Dan Higgins is the CEO and demi-god of Boston’s Lunchtime Studios. With his crack team of creative artists and programming ronin, they craft the characters, scenery, aesthetic, music and code that come together to make amazing apps and games.
Dan is no stranger to video games with a pedigree in the industry working on titles such as Empire Earth, Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War and SimCity Societies as well as published works in Game Programming Gems and Game Engine Gems.
After meeting Dan at this year’s PAX East show, we had a chance to catch up with him to talk about the upcoming game, Lords of New York, find out why he’s drawn to 1920’s New York, must have elements when designing video games and the creative collaboration within a game studio. This interview is in three parts, so buckle up as we transport you back to the time of “gangsters, flappers, bootleggers and jazz.” (Click here for Part 1 or Part 2)
SeagateCreative: The game’s main characters have a very distinctive look and feel? What was some of the creative inspiration behind their designs?
Thank you, it was a goal of ours! The art direction draws from a lot of inspiration from the animation studio responsible for Batman: The Animated Series and the works they’ve done. While we try to distinguish ourselves from any mainstream styles, we were drawn to the simplistic lines and color schemes from their work. We also admired art from Pathfinder® , and used it as inspiration for our body shapes and painted characters found on our website and in print. For in game characters, we pushed the bar with our detail since most of our characters are a single art asset; however our roots remain firmly in the minimalist yet expressive style.
Lords of New York – Animation
SeagateCreative: Games have so many moving parts with regards to design, graphics, audio and more. How do you creatively collaborate given all these components in making a game?
It’s a challenge! Many of us have multiple disciplines. Our primary artist is also involved in design, my wife does the producers role as well as the website and video editing. I’m involved in everything: lead programmer, lead designer, sound designer, voice acting, writing, quest creation, etc.
We have a lot of artists, thankfully. We have people from traditional AAA 3D games to people who specialize in doing high-end websites and usability. So, in the art department, while the majority of our staff is doing 2D characters, we have some specialists as well.
We did have to build our animation tool so that we could build our animation files without my intervention. Our primary artist does all the mouths, eyes, and animations in our tool so that we can just drop them into the game after I put in their database information.
Lords of New York is very data-driven. Quests, databases, almost everything comes out of data files.
For collaboration we use Skype, phone calls, project management software and our own forums on a daily basis. We’re spread out throughout the world, so it’s a challenge, but if you have people who are motivated and have deliverables each week, work can progress at a steady pace.
SeagateCreative: How does storage play a part in tying all the development aspects of Lords of New York together?
We’re a small company, but we’re doing big things. Storage is important on two fronts, managing resources and compilation speed. Our resource management is important because we certainly don’t want to lose the work we’ve done, but we also need a good process and reliable storage to synchronize content created by a team that is spread throughout the world.
Being the lead programmer, I need a really fast machine and specifically, super fast hard drive speed. Our engine is our own homegrown source code, and is approximately 200,000 lines of code in hundreds of source files. When I compile the game, the compiler will open / read / write thousands of files. Since this happens tens of thousands of times over the development of the game, hard drive speed is super important!
SeagateCreative: When will the Lords of New York release and on what platforms?
We’re aiming for PAX East 2014, and hopefully it doesn’t slip past then! If nothing else, we’ll have another demo ready by then and launch another Kickstarter.
My engine is written in C++ and is cross platform, so we have a lot of flexibility. Some platforms cost money and permission to get. We’re interested in the Wii U for example, but have to get accepted, and then buy the SDK. Likewise, we’re also interested in Steam, but will have to be accepted there as well. What we can control is building an incredible game, and hope that fans latch on to it and we get the fan support we need to gain access to these portals.
We already support Windows, Mac, iOS. We plan to come out for select Android devices, hope to get on Steam, and port to Windows Mobile devices, etc. In short, we’ll go where the customers want us and we can get access to the SDK (and approved). Each platform has its own pain points for porting, but being our own technology we can go wherever we can gain access.
Lords of New York – Gameplay
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