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Catching Up With Jeff Minter
Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield has a nice interview up today with Jeff Minter, 50% of the indie gaming force that is Llamasoft. He was the creative force behind the visualization for the Xbox 360, and is currently working on the title Space Giraffe for Live Arcade. They touch on Minter's work ethic, past projects, and a canceled GameCube project that never quite made it out the door. They also, of course, discuss Minter's plans for the future: "One thing I would like to explore in the future is making music more involved with the game, so that the type of music you put on would determine how the level played. Some music might create a more chilled level, whereas heavy metal and heavy techno might be more intense. I've got so many ideas, but we can't do them all on the first outing."
It's all about playability, and changing the game mechanics to fit the game. And fluffy animals. Jeff is one of the few people who will take a classic game gendre and make his version play different. For instance Sheep in Space for the C64 was a Defender clone. Until you pushed the joystick upwards and your sheep flipped upside down and the gravity started pulling him towards the land speeding above. This is the step he's taken with Space Giraffe. Underneath it looks like his past work on Tempest, but the gameplay is different. Try playing it like Tempest and you'll get swamped in no time at all, learn the new method and you'll be hooked for life. Fluffy animals? Well that's his life, and in the games he gets off with it because it's cute, he's eccentric, and his coding is so good that your fluffy animal is the best thing you've flown!