Two years with Vlambeer: the inside story on gaming’s greatest new studio
The typical game development studio will get about halfway through a game in two years. They’d be just about at the stage of a working build, burgeoning with bugs and still riddled with placeholder art. Two years is a lot of time, and getting that far is a lot of work.Vlambeer has released twelve games in two years, and before 2012 is done, there’ll probably be another pair added to the mix. For an indie studio, that’s all kinds of prolific – not to mention a little bit insane. But then if you look at the likes of Super Crate Box, Radical Fishing and Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, ‘insane’ seems fairly accurate. “Gorillas.” Rami Ismail, one half of Vlambeer, starts his own story. “It’s two gorillas throwing explosive bananas at one another,” he elaborates. “At some point I got interested in what all those characters on my screen were before the game started, so I changed stuff and that changed the game, which fascinated me.” And for all that Vlambeer has done to sidestep conventions and tread its own path, it’s tinkering that defines it most accurately.Read more…
