Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood (Pt 2)

Well, not quite. I think we do three digit hours rather than two... So it was a combination of that and, with our staff, everybody in the company that's permanent with us gets private health care, gets a proper pension, gym membership, and a ride to work scheme, and BUPA, dental, optical, all that stuff. Which is think is really important, because we're supposed to be a grown-up industry and not working above a sweaty laundrette, pushing out games and being exploited by whoever. We take ourselves really seriously, but the risk is massive for independent developers. In terms of your production team, if you're doing anything good it's very difficult to have more than one game, so if you're a good independent developer you're probably only working on one big game at a time. Which literally means you have a single source of revenue, which means that you're actively tied to that publisher support for whether you live or die. Every independent developer faces that, and it's almost always the reason why they go bust. They fall out with the publisher, things go wrong.

We've been lucky. For 10 years we've collected every milestone payment that's ever been owed to us, we've never defaulted on a creditor, we've never had to make anybody redundant, we've never have a project cancelled... But nobody's a psychic, it's always impossible to know how things will go. So I think that the best thing any developer can do is make stuff that they can stand by. For us, that's been the reason why we've survived for so long – publishers know ultimately that, no matter what we're doing, we're ultimately doing it because we believe that it's going to be good. We've never made anything that's crap, we've never compromised on iterating on something until we felt it was good. We've always been really prepared to cut content that isn't fun. Even Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, we had four complete maps that we didn't ship with the game. One was a perfect-scale replica, fully textured, of Colditz. We invested probably 18 man months of time in it, but it just wasn't fun. Ed [Stern] wrote the story for that over and over again, trying to solve building the glider that you used to escape from that map at the end.

You know they did build a glider in Colditz? It's hilarious. Colditz was the place where all the people who had escaped the POW camps were sent to, it was supposed to be inescapable. Within six months, they had copies of every key in the entire building, and one of the guys said "y'know, we could build a glider." They knocked it up, they did this thing and then the word came through [from the Allies] that "we've invaded Europe, we'll be right with you: don't try to escape." "Aw, but we've built this glider..."