Jonathan Chey's career in the games industry has come full circle. Since forming Irrational Games with work-mates Kevine Levine and Robert Fermier after the closure of Looking Glass Studios in 2000, he's seen the company he helped co-found grow and handle multi million dollar projects like Bioshock and X-COM for the past decade. Chey has decided to move on from 2K Marin (previously Irrational Games Canberra and 2K Australia) and instead of kicking back, he's making it out on his own and making games he wants to make as a self-funded independent games developer called Blue Manchu.
In a new interview with Gamasutra, Chey describes his small team which consists of himself as the only full-time developer, former Irrational Games Canberra employers, Farbs (Captain Forever), Art Director, Ben Lee, and a few other colleagues as a "loose collective". Chey works and communicates wiwth his team with the help of widely available cloud-based services such as Skype and Dropbox. From Gamasutra...
(Chey) It's kind of an unusual business. At the moment, we're a totally distributed organization. We don't have an actual physical office. It's kind of, I guess, a loose collective. Nobody's working on it full time except for me, so it's really, I suppose, a real collaborative group little studio, rather than a conventional game development office.
And that may change a little bit in the future, but what's nice about that is that I'm able to bring in people who have exactly the skills I want when I want them -- for any amount of time that they want to contribute, too. Because a lot of them are actually doing other things, have other interests, as well, that they're pursuing.
Their first project is Card Hunter, is a free to play Flash-based, microtransaction-powered card/board game hybrid. Rather than going the modern route for the game with animated characters, Chey has decided to take a relatively low-fi approach to the visuals...
(Jonathan Chey) From a visual thematic point of view, we're guys who played, or thought a lot about playing, D&D back in the '80s, or even earlier, and so we've gone for that style. The whole game is themed around a quite a nostalgic look back to that...
...we're not going to go for like some sort of super modern engine kind of game, we're going to reach back into the very early days of D&D. And we're also not going to try and hide the fact that this is a board game and a card game, by doing a lot of kind of complicated 3D animation. We present the game as very much like an actual board game, so there's a board with little cardboard pieces and so on. It's pretty different from anything else that's out there, I think.
Chey explains that while this game will appeal to a niche audience, the new business models and opportunities that have opened up in the industry in recent times and the reach of independent games to find a wider number of gamers means that if Card Hunter finds just a hundred thousand of gamers, it is successful.
For the entire interview, head on over to Gamasutra...