Earlier this year we brought you the news that Aussie based developers Red Tribe were working on a Wii game, we later learnt that the game was a platforming and was based on an Warner Bros. IP. Now we sit down and chat with Chris Mosely and talk up Red Tribes’ upcoming games, their game for the Wii and how they are going with it, who and what Red Tribe are and more! Thanks to Chris from Red Tribe for doing the interview! You can visit Red Tribes website here as well .
I’m here with Chris Mosely, the CEO of Australian developer Red Tribe. Chris; thanks for taking this interview. Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your background in the industry? Well I started out many years ago in England at the ripe old age of 9. My first experiences were programming the BBC Model B; we only had 32k of RAM to work with back then but there was no shortage of hubris and imagination. Most of the games had to be coded in 6502 assembly language. When I was older I worked as a consultant on a number of other titles, I was hired to go in and fix problems with programming teams that were falling behind on their delivery dates. Teams were much smaller in those days of course, sometimes only one or two people. My dream then was to study physics at Cambridge University and I was on track to achieve that, but when my parents moved to Australia I didn’t look back. I ended up studying Software Engineering at Melbourne University while simultaneously starting my first game company Blue Tongue Entertainment where I was also the CEO for 8 years. I was particularly interested in the project management parts of the courses; we had some great professors back then. Software Engineering is basically all about project management, so we had processes and techniques drummed into us in great detail and at great length. BT went on to become very successful and continues to be. Our first released title at Blue Tongue was AFL Finals Fever for the PC followed by Riding Star The Ultimate Horse Adventure, one of only a handful of games for girls at that time. This was followed by Starship Troopers Terran Ascendancy and finally Jurassic Park Operation Genesis. Can you tell us about little more about Red Tribe? Red Tribe now has around 45 staff internally (and another 10 external staff) and continues to grow rapidly. It has one single focus, making fun games that people will enjoy playing. We are working on PS2, Wii, 360, PC and PS3. Red Tribe is a hot-bed of activity, ideas and energy. Red Tribe for me was the realisation of a dream. I wanted to work with people that loved what they did and were bursting with ideas and passion. I felt in order to achieve this I had to go back to basics hence leaving Blue Tongue and starting from scratch in order to re-invent the way games were being built in the Australian context. Red Tribe doesn’t market itself as an Australian game developer. We’re part of the international game development community. We charge exactly the same rates as our US counterparts and this puts us in a very strong financial position, something that is very important in the Entertainment industry. This gives us more options and flexibility. Red Tribe is a sophisticated studio in the sense that we have mature processes and practices. We’re always looking at ways of working smarter. Processes are at the heart of Red Tribe’s success. The other key ingredient is innovation. It’s a word you hear bandied about a lot these days, so how do you achieve it. Partly this comes back to processes again. You can read about some of our processes on our website under news (Dissecta Speech). One of our core philosophies at Red Tribe is Rapid Prototyping. We have a dedicated rapid prototyping team. Every idea, concept or design element is first prototyped and tested before it ends up in the game. There is no substitute for being able to play something. Prototyping gives us the opportunity to innovate because it provides a safe environment to experiment. Once we are happy with the result we can then develop them into the final working game without damaging the development process itself. Prototyping also allows us to play out our ideas months and years in advance leading to better outcomes. The other area that I think Red Tribe excels at is our work philosophy. We don’t believe in working long hours if it can be avoided, it’s counter productive. It’s well understood that working longer doesn’t necessarily lead to better results. More likely you end up going backwards, so we’re careful to try and manage our time smartly. No one in the company needs to be micro-managed, we all love what we do, if anything we need to be reminded to take our time and do it properly. This of course can only be achieved if the company’s strategy is aligned with this idea. With this in mind, we have only taken on jobs of an appropriate size and budget so we do have the time and resources to do it properly. It has worked very well for us so far, but we realise that we need to increase the size of our teams substantially and we’re working to remedy this. Rushing things always leads to more problems down the track. When we do have to work back (and it does happen from time to time) then we always look at what lead to it. Was it a mistake in our estimation, did we try to do too much in a given iteration, were there external factors involved. Without this continual analysis we would not be achieving the sorts of results that we are now getting. We didn’t start out that way of course, in the early years it was a lot harder.

Can you tell us about the games you currently working on? We’re getting close to releasing our first AAA next-generation title (which is also backwardly compatible with PS2 – a huge challenge I might add). It’s a platformer, something I’ve always wanted to work on so we jumped at the opportunity when it came around. We have started full production on our second AAA next gen title, and are in pre-production on a third. It’s an amazing result so far don’t you think? We’ve got a brand new next-generation engine and I think people are going to be amazed at the results Australian game developers can achieve. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t our technology prowess that ultimately lead to our success (of course you have to have that too), it has been our understanding of the production values, and the industry’s shift towards more sophisticated ways of looking at entertainment and how these new sets of objectives and strategies might be realised given the new challenges that now face everyone. In my opinion there is more innovation going on games than every before . It’s probably the most exciting time ever to be in the game industry. You’re currently working on a Wii game that’s a Warner Bros. IP. Are you able to reveal any more details on that title? I can’t reveal details yet unfortunately, Warner Bros. is very tight lipped about its projects in development, but I can tell you that we’re having great fun working with the Wii. Warner Bros. is a great company to work with too; they really make us feel like we are part of the team. We’re currently prototyping different ways we can use the controller including gesturing and other such techniques to control the characters in our platform game. Of course I would love to tell you all the details. I think that Warner Bros. will make a big press announcement early next year. How do you find developing for the Wii when compared to the more powerful and HD capable consoles like the Xbox 360? The Wii has been a dream to work with so far. We were all very surprised given how early it is in the development cycle. Unfortunately I’m under a very strict NDA with Nintendo and Microsoft so it would be unwise to say anything further. We are definitely enjoying the Wii experience so far. How has developing games to use the Wii controller been? What kind of ideas have you been implementing with it? It’s still very early days but I think the possibilities are endless. We have had some crazy ideas, there’s already quite a bit of information that has leaked out onto the Internet from what I can tell. One area that interests me is combining the controller with artificial intelligence. In this way you can think of AI as adding additional degrees of freedom to the input device. Let’s say a hypothetical input device has 6 degrees of freedom, then by using AI to analysis and respond to the users inputs you are amplifying the amount of information that can be transmitted from the payer to the game in a given amount of time. I was part of an informal team last year that experimented with single button games; we had some amazing results with contextual controls with just a single button. In some ways limiting and constraining your game can lead to more innovative and exciting results. The Wii controller provides us with almost unlimited upside potential. It’s scary really 

What are some challenges of being a developer in Australia? Are the local branches of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft supportive? We don’t really see ourselves as an ‘Australian Developer’ although we are physically based in Australia. Of course we are patriotic and care about Australian Development as a whole, but it would be unwise to ignore the fact that it’s a global industry and it’s globally competitive. Our standards are set by international criteria. We market ourselves in exactly the same ways that a game developer in the US or the UK might. We don’t sell ourselves as a cheaper option, which would be a big mistake and doesn’t fit in well with our strategies and philosophies of game development. I think Australian game development is really starting to mature. It’s a lot more sophisticated in its approach than it has been in the past, and there is a lot more money available for development these days. Outside of game development, what games do you enjoy playing yourself? Personally I’ve always enjoyed playing RTS games, but more recently I’ve been getting into Platform games. There’s a lot to be said for a game that you can play for 30 minutes each day and just walk away from. I think I’ve lost far too many hours/days/weeks/months/years playing RTS games so its time to move on. :) Thank you very much for your time here today Chris. My pleasure :) always like talking about this stuff. I probably waffle on a bit much at times, but you’ve got to admit it’s exciting stuff. You can visit Red Tribes website here! Again thanks to Chris for the interview!