
[In the next in a series of Road to the IGF Mobile interviews with 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile finalists, FingerGaming speaks to Randy Smith of Spider developer Tiger Style, whose game is currently competing in the Best Mobile Game category, having won the IGF Mobile award for Best iPhone Game.]
As pastoral as it is eerie, Tiger Style’s elegant Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor ended 2009 heralded as not only one of the year’s best iPhone games, but one of the best on any platform.
Having recently won the IGF Mobile Best iPhone game award, FingerGaming spoke to industry veteran and Tiger Style head Randy Smith about the studio’s stunning debut heading into the IGF.
What is your background in game development?
I’ve in the games industry for 12 years, primarily as a designer / director. I worked on the Thief series with Looking Glass and ION Storm, and consulted with Arkane Studios, Ubisoft, and others. My most recent gig before starting Tiger Style was a creative director at EA on one of the projects with Steven Spielberg.
Can you tell us what development tools you used to create Spider?
The iPhone SDK, xCode, Photoshop, and various other visual/audio/music creators and editors.
How long was the game in development?
8 months.
How did the initial concept come about?
We solicited the team for short, 1-2 sentence game concepts. Of those, we selected a small handful and did treatments of them – about 20 pages of PowerPoint that got into more depth of what the game would be about and how it would work.
Spider’s treatment attracted the most attention within the team. Originally we envisioned it as more of a slow-paced spider simulator, but during the pre-production and prototyping phases we refined our movement controls and web-building mechanic which in turn pushed the game into the form you see today.
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Tags: hornet smash, randy smith, spider: the secret of bryce manor, tiger style