Into Introversion

Introversion have talked on a number of occasions about what they’ve learned in their rapid progression from Uplink, the simple, quirky hacking game, to the Tron-alike action-strategy of Darwinia, but now they’ve moved on to multiplayer, with the thermonuclear Wargames homage DefCon, and a multiplayer sequel to Darwinia, Multiwinia. What is Delay learning now? “Darwinia was a big creative learning experience for us, but for Defcon it was much more about the technical challenges,” Delay explains. “The basic game of Defcon was set in stone very early on (it’s a simpler game than Darwinia) and most of the challenge with Defcon revolved around solid Internet multiplayer.” What players have talked about with the most enthusiasm is the clarity and balance that DefCon offers. The shooting death-count, the rising tension: it’s classic multiplayer, without being anything like any mainstream multiplayer game out there.

Of course, it was new to Introversion too. “We’d never done anything multiplayer before, so we had to create all of the game logic, network code, and all the server infrastructure stuff from scratch. The benefit of this kind of progress is that Introversion is growing with every game – releasing Multiwinia is now a lot easier than it would have been, because we’ve tons of experience in making multiplayer work reliably now. Each game we make we learn a little bit more, and develop a little bit more technology that we can use on the next game.”