6/26/2023 0 Comments Void bastards tipsJon: I don’t think we have a niche, other than not being mainstream. And it’s very different from the first one, Card Hunter, which is an online tabletop RPG and CCG hybrid. GWO: Void Bastards is the second game that Blue Manchu has made. It’s not really that centralised though – we ran Void Bastards between Canberra, Brighton and Toronto. Jon: I guess there was a natural gravitation back to Canberra as that’s where I ran the Irrational Australian studio for many years. Why did you transition to a more conventional centralized structure? GWO: Now, as far as I understand, you have a permanent team in Canberra. There’s really no substitute for voice chat to maintain a sense of connection. It’s critical to find times where you can talk and not just fall into the habit of communicating via email. You learn a lot about time zones when you work remotely using an international team. We did a lot of text chat and Skype was really bad as a place for archiving and searching those conversations. The biggest obstacle was probably Skype’s horrible text logging. Even back in the mists of time eight years ago, there were plenty of tools for remote collaboration – Skype, email, SVN and so on. Jon: When we started we had no office at all – I was working from home as was everyone on the project. Could you please tell us how you were able to function as a virtual studio? GWO: In its early days, Blue Manchu was a distributed studio with lots of people working remotely and part-time. The first members of the team were ex-Irrational devs and then we added more people through contacts. Jon: Once again, I was able to leverage my experience and history. GWO: When founding Blue Manchu, how did you go about putting together a team? I’m happy to do my own thing and take whatever comes. Shooting to repeat those achievements would be a recipe for disappointment. Jon: I honestly doubt that I’ll ever work on games with that sort of impact again. GWO: Does your involvement in BioShock and System Shock 2 haunt you? Do you feel any subjective pressure to try and make games that would be as impactful? If things didn’t work out I guess I would have been back knocking on doors to try to get a regular job, which would have been … disappointing. ![]() I probably didn’t take enough time to think through the stakes. It was much less daunting than it was when we started Irrational Games as a bunch of nobodies. Jon: Yes, I came into indie development with a huge array of advantages over someone who might be starting out from scratch. ![]() GWO: Did your name and past experience open a lot of doors when you decided to go indie? How dramatic were the stakes for you? Jon: I don’t think anything’s ever “everything you hope it will be”, is it? Anyway, in my case indie development is a huge improvement over AAA work for me. Eight years into your free flight as an indie, has independent game making been everything you hoped it would be? GWO: Jon, you said once that you left Irrational Games because you wanted to be less involved in studio politics and more involved in actually making games. ![]() Jonathan Chey, Blue Manchu founder and CEO Going indie Game World Observer talked to Jon Chey about his latest game and the rest of his indie adventure. In 2011, he founded Blue Manchu, the studio responsible for vastly different Card Hunter (2013) and Void Bastards that came out on May 29, 2019. Jon stuck around for some years and in 2009 decided to leave AAA game development. In 2005, Irrational Games was acquired by Take-Two Interactive. At Irrational, Jon produced, designed and programmed games such as System Shock 2, Freedom Force and BioShock. ![]() After 20 years of making games, Jonathan Chey just refuses to settle.Īn alumnus of Looking Glass Studios where he worked on Thief: the Dark Project, he went on to co-found Irrational Games with Ken Levine and Robert Fermier.
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