Could this be the indie lover’s Bioshock? Raw Games talks The Spire

Every four or five months a new version or chapter of it would come out, but we realised that the more you go into the industry, the more you get shoe-horned. A lot of the five-six hour games like that fantastic indie title The Ball that came out recently – that’s the minimal product length that people want. So it depends on how it goes, again, it depends on where we stand with it in the future, but right now? It’s probably around… Actually, can I explain what we are currently doing before I get to that, so you’ll understand what I mean?

Sure.

If you look at the indie database for example, a lot of the small independent game companies that are churning stuff out – a lot of them will put out stuff way before it’s finished, they’ll put out models and you’ll see a lot of stuff like that. And that’s kind of the indie scene, the traditional mod-style format – whereas we don’t do that, we only want to put out stuff that’s either polished or looks complete. So some people would say about 50%, but I’d say it’s more like 30%, because we want to make sure that whatever we do we release something that’s quality.

That’s the ultimate question, I suppose – how much you invest before you secure a publisher. It’s interesting what you say about the Indie Database serving more as an advertising channel for unfunded projects than a place for finished games…

Oh it’s massively important. I think that the stuff that the Indie Database do is just incredible. At the end of the day, you need to have a quality bar, and I think that the commercial industry – or I should say the mainstream industry – should really take a leaf out of the independent industry’s book, because if you look at some of the quality levels that are set within the indie scene, it’s just startling.

And not just 2D games, you’re looking at 3D titles – like for example there’s a title called Overgrowth. We’re massive fans of what those guys are doing, they’re creating their own engine and doing something that’s really different and innovative. The thing is that the quality bar for that title alone, it already looks practically complete, and that’s the problem with the industry, it doesn’t always get to that point.

The game's crackly holographic displays belie Raw's love of Dead Space.

What do you think of the console side of things? Would you like to see The Spire on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network?

Yeah. Again, we’re not at liberty to say too much at this point in time. Just so you know where we’re at as a business, at the moment we have been talking to different companies. We’ve been very lucky – well, scratch that word – we’ve been blessed I think, we’ve been at the right places at the right times, and people have acknowledged what we’re trying to do.

And at this moment in time we’re talking to different publishers, that again we’re not at liberty to talk about, and different game companies, who possibly could help us get into console markets, and maybe help us port The Spire to… I’m not going to say it, everybody’s mentioned it, but let’s just say that there are new peripherals that have just come out on the market, that we’ve been talking about doing something with for quite a while…

It’s like you’re reading my mind. I was, of course, going to ask about “certain peripherals” and how they might help you translate mouse and keyboard control to console.

We’ve got some really good ideas. We’re really going “indie” on that. By that I mean that a lot of indie developers aren’t afraid to do some cool and different things with their control schemes, they don’t have to fit the typical first-person shooter mould. And we’re definitely not trying to do that, although some of the gameplay is very much what you could imagine in Half-Life for example – the combat and some of the ideas, they’re going to be really quite cool. And I’m putting my neck on the line with that one!

Just a few questions to wrap up. The laboratory environments in the trailer look quite clean. Is there going to be any degradation, as in Portal – seeing the gaps in the polish, where things have broken down?

Let’s just say first and foremost – yeah, we’re in another facility, yeah, we might have to escape from it… We weren’t really anticipating to get where we are today, the actual scale of what’s going on. I’d like to explain for you at some point before we finish about the rest of the team – just so people understand that Raw Games aren’t just a bunch of wannabes…

I don’t think anybody’s going to think that, once they’ve seen your trailer.

You’re too kind! We’re really humbled by the response to the trailer. At this moment in time we’re clocking around 130,000 views, and we just could not believe it. We’ve only actually asked a few small independent sites to post it out there, and one of those sites picked it up, and it just kind of exploded. Going back to what you were saying, sorry – what was the question?

Companion Cube with the edges sanded off, anyone?

I was just asking about environmental change. Will you stay in the same underground facility throughout?

We definitely want to have a progression because the story’s so integral to what we want to do. We’re such big fans of for example Bioshock – of the storytelling, that is, I don’t want people to misconstrue that. There’s definitely a progression, the same [evolution] you saw in Bioshock but slightly different. We’re not disclosing much of it. You’ll see a lot more when we release what we’re calling the Prelude.

Is that the environment in the trailer?

No it’s not. And that’s all I’m going to say! Because it’s quite different. And to anticipate your next question, on when that would be out – we can’t really give a time on that right now, just because of everything that’s going on, but we’ll let you know.

OK. You wanted to explain something about the rest of your team?

Yeah, the rest of the guys that are on board, the one thing that we have to go on is that I’m bringing in different people from all across the globe. We’ve got one guy from Argentina, one guy from Bangalore. And we’ve just acquired some office space over at Birmingham in the UK, which has been amazing, and we have all been really happy with that, the people who are there. The thing that I’d explain is that, although we are a small team, we’re really dedicated to what we’re doing, and we’re really dedicated to hearing what the public want us to do. As an indie company, a lot of people are asking “what’s going on with…? are they going to do…? is it anything different…?” – we don’t think we’re going to reinvent the wheel, but we’re going to do some cool stuff that we would want to see in games we like playing – you know those times you play games and you think “wouldn’t it be cool if we could just do this, or do that” – that’s what we want to do, we want those cool little bits in, to make it innovative, like for example the combat mechanics.

I think it’s refreshing to hear that you’re aiming to innovate without rebuilding genres from the ground up. People often look to the indie scene as a source of “pure-blood” originals, but in practice I think anything that arrives completely out of the blue tends to disappear straight back into the blue, if that makes sense? You’ve got to put together something that’s recognisable, then take it somewhere else.

Yeah, totally. We had a great comment, I think it might have been on a Kotaku post or something – somebody mentioned the fact that it was very similar to this, that and the other, and we absolutely don’t deny that. But somebody else came back with “I hope you guys are happy with your Halo 93s and Modern Warfare 72s…” [laughs] Those games are brilliant, Halo’s one of my favourite franchises. We realise that we’re not going to be able to do something entirely original, we just want to do something a bit special. Years ago we thought DOOM was a great game, and when you look at the evolution of that you get to Modern Warfare or something like that and you then realise that there’s something special within that kind of genre, we just want to do the same thing with a twist on the FPS genre.

There certainly is. John, thanks for talking to us – best of luck with The Spire.

Release dates are still TBC.