At the Casual Connect Europe 2015 conference, Andy Sum and Matt Hall revealed their processes, influences and key decisions made during the three month development cycle of their hit game Crossy Road. “Our goal was not to make money; our goal was to make something popular,” says Andy Sum.
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Andy Sum has just finished his university degree in Software Engineering, but he is already experiencing a meteoric rise in the games industry. Together with Matt Hall, he created the extraordinarily successful free-to-play game Crossy Road. Several months ago, when he and Hall realized the game was turning out to be something very special, they founded their company, Hipster Whale.
Seeing Crossy Road climb the charts and reach so many people has been the most exciting time he has experience in his career so far. It was been the making of game after game, especially during the previous year, that allowed him to acquire the skills needed to develop this game.
Realizing His Dream
Andy’s dream as a child was to become a game developer. He remembers always being fascinated with games, and at a very early age he began making games as a hobby. Once he started becoming increasingly adept with these creations, he made a definite decision to turn it into a career. He began his indie projects when, as he relates, “I had an itch nagging away at me to work on my ideas. There came a time when I just had to try and build them.”
He considers himself fortunate to have grown up around computers, with a father who encouraged his interest. During this time he played DOS games and began putting his own ideas for games on paper.
Inspiration Comes as a Movie
Today Andy finds often finds his inspiration for games through watching movies, especially sci-fi, as well as through playing different games. But the most interesting place where he discovered a new brainwave was an art gallery, seeing a painting of a boy with a red ball. Immediately he wanted to make a game about chasing red balls!
New ideas usually come to his mind in the form of a short movie. Then he works toward recreating the feelings and visuals from that movie. As he says, “I keep iterating until I get there, or until what I have is better than I imagined.”
Every Project Has Challenges
When he encounters a creative block, Andy finds it helpful to step away and relax. Watching movies and talking with friends usually helps him generate new ideas. Fortunately he has had few blocks while creating Crossy Road and has many ideas for new characters and things to put into the game. In general, blocks are relatively rare for him; usually he has many ideas to try out, but the important issue is making the right decisions for the game.
Tech problems are part of the challenge in every project. Sometimes plugins will conflict with one another, and sometimes there is a stubborn bug you just can’t fix. He notes that these are always difficult and take a lot of time to deal with. But the reward comes when he sees the creation being played by millions of people.
Because he is often working alone, one of the more demanding aspects of his work is keeping motivated when things are difficult. Working with other people is helpful because they can then talk about the development problems and help each other.
Andy, Matt Hall and one other programmer are the only members of the development team at Hipster Whale, and because they think similarly, working together is very easy, Andy says. When working with others, he looks for those who can work independently and execute with a high degree of polish.
Andy has great fun making exciting new characters and then watching players’ reactions when they talk about these characters on Twitter. If he had the resources, he would like to create some variation of an MMO. While he realizes he shares this ambition with most game developers, his game would be “some kind of massively connected real-time experience.”
His hobbies tend to overlap with his career. In his free time he is usually watching movies or playing games. Lately he has been playing The Last of Us on PS4. He also enjoys coding prototypes for new game ideas.
During the last couple of years, Andy has seen the increasing popularity of YouTube Let’s Plays and streaming. He believes these media will continue to grow and become more and more important. So he intends to make the games that people will want to share and talk about with their friends.
To anyone interested in this career, he says, “Participate in game jams and release what you create. Make lots of good games!”
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