Wideload's Seropian Talks XBLA, Outsourcing, UE3

Author: by Brandon Sheffield, Staff

Speaking in an in-depth new interview with Gamasutra, Wideload Games founder Alex Seropian has been discussing the company's strategy, revealing XBLA plans, outsourcing practicalities, and his experiences with Epic's Unreal Engine 3. As Gamasutra originally confirmed when the interview was conducted at E3, Seropian confirmed: "We have 20 people now - we actually have two teams. We have a team that's doing ['political party game'] Hail to the Chimp, which is the Stubbs The Zombie team with a couple of more people on it, and then we have a real small team that's doing games for digital download." When pressed for more details, Seropian admitted that "we have a game right now that is destined for Live Arcade." In addition, when discussing Wideload's outsourcing tactics, much-discussed in the Stubbs Game Developer postmortem published last year, Seropian revealed: "We build a prototype with our internal team, which is at least the first of every asset, and then we spend a lot of time doing preproduction with that internal team for the rest of the project. Then we send a lot of stuff out from that point. With Hail to the Chimp, we've been outsourcing some of the code. We did very little of that with Stubbs." Finally, it was confirmed that the firm is using Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to make Hail To The Chimp, and Seropian commented of his impressions thus far: "It's a great toolset, it's a great engine, and you have to be a little careful about what you want to do with it. We're doing something very non-standard with it. I don't know if anyone else is making a party game, but [it won't be with] the very stylized graphics we have. That's a challenge for us, because Unreal was designed to make Gears of War. Some of it's been a challenge, but some of it's been great. The whole tool chain aspect of it has been really good for us." The full Gamasutra interview with Seropian is now available for reading, including lots more information on outsourcing tips, the political nature of Hail To The Chimp, and much more.