Interview with Chris McGarry of Ominous Development

If you’ve been reading Penny Arcade in the past few weeks, or have been reading coverage of PAX, you’ve probably heard of a little game called Strange Attractors 2 by Ominous Development. I got the distinct privilege of sitting down with Ominous Development’s music and sound specialist, Chris McGarry, regarding his team, their game and his impressions on the indie game development scene.

GotGame: For starters, who is Ominous Development?

Chris McGarry: Basically, I had a group of friends in high school and we hung out together outside of school and this was back in the days of dial-up. We’d play DOOM matches over the modem on IPX networks and we were all really into gaming.

There’s Bret, he’s our 3D artist and all around awesome dude. There’s Eric who’s kind of the head of the company, he manages all of our business stuff and is also an awesome programmer. He’d probably be our CEO if we were making money. Then there’s Scott who’s our genius tech guy, he wrote a large portion of the engine for Strange Attractors. I mainly handle the music and sound effects, as well as testing and whatnot.

Basically, we were all friends in high school and we all really loved games and were like “we should do this for a living… yeah right.” I went to school for computer science for a while and we all went our separate ways after high school and stayed in contact. Bret went into 3D art, Eric went into engineering, and Scott is just a self-taught amazing programmer who didn’t even need any schooling.

Eric, Scott and, I think Bret, mainly, were always working on games a little bit. We never really finished anything, we put together a bunch of little games, 26 actually, but they weren’t really polished or released. That’s basically our company. We moved across the four corners of the Earth after high school and we communicate through email and we use Google docs quite a bit. That’s pretty much how we operate.

It seems like a lot of your company’s success came after you geographically scattered. How does that affect the work you guys do?

It kind of sucks, but it’s kind of necessary because we all have full time jobs outside of the games industry. I work at Borders corporate, Eric works for Bells Brewery out in Kalamazoo, and Bret went into 3D design but he had some wrist problems because of all the mouse and keyboard action, so he said screw that. He then went into physics up in Northern Michigan and then went back into game programming.

Did that study of physics bring gravity to the fore in Strange Attractors?

Actually no. I’m not really sure what impact Bret had on the core mechanics of it. Eric started work on it before Bret went into physics. The genesis of Strange Attractors was back in ’96-’97, Eric had a computer and was trying to program Pong and he found out that it was really fucking boring. He was trying to figure out how to put english on the ball, and he couldn’t figure it out so he decided to throw gravity wells in there to get the ball moving around.

Strange Attractors 1

So we were playing around with that and decided it was kind of cool. And then Eric and I had an idea for a multiplayer game like Pong — this is gonna sound really hokie now, but back in ‘96 this was the shit — you could have two people at the same keyboard and a field of six gravity wells. Each player could turn on any one of the six gravity wells to try and get a ball into a goal. We ended up with a game called Graviball which had money and even robot goal keepers.

Anyway, fast-forward ten years or so and Eric found a one switch game competition over at oneswitch.org.uk, sponsored by Retro Remakes and its deadline was in one month. We thought that old hockey idea could work for one switch. We found that having deadlines and having restrictions are great for getting shit done. I made a bunch of music and Eric and Scott did a bunch of programming and Bret did all the graphics in about a month, and what we ended up with was Strange Attractors 1.

The best part of it, in my opinion, was having Bret and Eric come over to my house to do all the sound effects. We got a big case of beer and set up a bunch of microphones and made the most annoying noises we could possibly make. I don’t think I have ever laughed harder in my entire life. We did the exact same thing for Strange Attractors 2 and there’s even a montage of outtakes at the end of the game.

Continued on page 2.

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