The deadline was what it was, and we had about a year to plan." There was a phase where it was going to be a digital on-demand game, and then it kind of swapped out after pre-production to be a boxed product. "But I think everyone circled around the fact that it was a big risk if we're setting up a studio as well. "When we started pitching the game, we pitched a full sequel with a new city," says Noyce. So we started pitching it - it was lots and lots of conversations with Microsoft, until they were like yeah, you've done a lot of good stuff for us and we trust in you, and that was the start."Ĭrackdown 2's development was famously swift, the game releasing just over a year and a half after Ruffian first opened its doors. "We knew, tangentially, that Crackdown 2, wasn't getting picked up. It was enough for Microsoft to entrust Noyce and a small team with the keys to one of its newer franchises. "It was good timing, and with the Xbox 360 in general - those were good games." "We had a good few years and I got to work with a bunch of really good studios," he says of working with teams like Bizarre and Lionhead in their prime when the were producing hits like Fable 2 and Project Gotham Racing 3. Noyce's own path to independent development has been an illustrious one, commencing at Climax before a lengthy stint at Microsoft ended up with him helping found Ruffian. Me and a friend used to play it constantly - religiously - and it was one of the things that got me interested in doing development." "Head over Heels was the first game I ever played, and I spent a summer as a kid designing a bunch of rooms for it. But it started to feel okay straight away," says Noyce, before delving a little deeper into some of his inspirations. So I knocked up a really quick prototype in two or three days - it's up on my YouTube channel and it looks awful. "I woke up the next morning and thought sod it, let's have a go. Noyce, who had not long left Crackdown 2 developer Ruffian - a company he helped found - was having a drunken Twitter conversation with prolific developer Ste Pickford, who pointed him towards speed-runs of the SNES action-puzzler Equinox and suggested he should have a go at making his own take on a genre that's been neglected over time. Lumo's a game conceived through a happy accident, too. It's a game hazily woven together from various influences: the isometric adventures of Jon Ritman loom large, and it's easy to see the spirit of Head Over Heels in the chunky charismatic art. Noyce's first game as an independent, Lumo, is full of happy accidents like this, a chance occurrence that ended up as a full-blown mechanic which gently nods towards the classic Bubble Bobble. "Then I forgot to take the collision off, and I was jumping off the water and noticed I bounced right off of it - and I thought 'hello!'" "I needed something to make the water look more evil," Gareth Noyce says as he talks through what constitutes work for him right now.
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