Short was the captain of the ship Xin Ran Liu was the art department Mike Ditchburn was responsible for programming and Jongwoo Kim was in charge of gameplay features. Two things, she said, helped: the first was that everyone on the team went in with a clear role. Creating a studio together was a bit of a risk, but we all had an extremely positive first impression of each other, so I’m glad we went with our instincts." "We were basically four strangers, who were semi-acquaintances only because of a local indie dev meetup here in Montreal. "Not only had we never worked together, but we weren't even friends," Short told CNET Australia.
#SHATTERED PLANET IOS VS PC EDITION MODS#
After cutting her teeth on mods and MMORPGs - including a several-year stint at Funcom working on Age of Conan and The Secret World - and forming an incubator, she has embarked into the world of independent development with her very own studio, a team of developers who worked together for the very first time on Shattered Planet. Kitfox studio head Tanya Short knows her stuff. Shattered Planet's excellence, though, becomes a little less surprising when you take a careful look at where it came from. As "PDL" implies, every level is randomly generated, and - like a permadeath dungeon crawler - you have to beat enemies, collect loot and find the portal (in this case, a teleporter) to the next level, with every death losing all your gear but not, interestingly, your stats.
Players take the role of a clone explorer who is working to map and catalogue a planet that has been blown apart. The game itself is what some developers are starting to call a procedural death labyrinth (PDL), an alternative term for the gameplay style more commonly known as roguelike. As a first release from a brand-new studio, it's certainly a surprise - carefully executed from start to finish to provide an in-depth experience that can be played in either short or long stints. Shattered Planet is the rare bird on the mobile games market.
CNET Australia caught up with studio head Tanya Short to talk IAP, inclusivity and the perfect PDL. Fledgling studio Kitfox Games has just released its first game, ticking all the boxes for an excellent mobile experience.