This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 26, released in October 2008

Mark Morris

After playing the preview code of Multiwinia, Dev.Mag went to have with a chat with Mark Morris, MD of Introversion.

Just after we won the 2006 IGF award for Darwinia we were talking with Microsoft about getting Darwinia onto XBox Live Arcade. They were keen, but wanted us to include a multiplayer mode within the package. At first we thought this would be a quick job, but over time we realised we were really onto something. Multiwinia was really great fun to play and we decided to turn it into the next major release from Introversion. We had to work really hard to get such a variety of maps and different modes, but we are really pleased with the results!

Design at introversion is really iterative. Some of the modes were really obvious - like King of the Hill, but the more complex modes like Assault, Rocket Riot and Blitzkreig took us a long time to get right. Basically we would try something, see if it was fun or not and develop it. Multiwinia is all about fun and action and if we weren't having fun with a particular mode we would try for a while and then scrap it if we couldn't get it right.

Multiwinia and DEFCON are very different games so from a design perspective DEFCON didn't influence Multiwinia (other than a rather unsubtle nod to DEFCON included as a crate power-up). That said we had learnt a lot about networking and game stability from our work on DEFCON. The problem was that we had to go back to the original Darwinia code which wasn't as robust as our latter work - the result was that much of the code that we had written for DEFCON needed to be re-written for Multiwinia.

The 360 is a really great platform to work with. The console itself is basically a PC, but they do some clever stuff to get as much out of the hardware as possible, this meant that we were able to get a basic port up and running quickly, but the real challenge is getting the performance up. Of course we are still a little bit off the Live Arcade launch, so you'll need to ask me the question again in a few months!

Multiwinia was designed with the X360 controller in mind, but it was Darwinia that has (is) giving us the most trouble. We are nearly there, but we did think it was going to be a much easier job than it actually turned out to be. I think we have gone through about four or five control revisions and I'm still not sure we are there yet!