Interview with Chris McGarry of Ominous Development

It sounds like you’ve been around for a while. How young were you guys when you started the company?

Well, it wasn’t really a company. We were basically just like, “lets call ourselves Ominous Development, that sounds cool.” I think it was ’96 maybe ’97; it was our freshmen year in high school, maybe sophomore year.

Strange Attractors 2

Back at that time, Bret was dabbling in some 3D stuff, I was kind of dabbling in some 3D stuff and Eric was doing programming. Since then I haven’t done any 3D whatsoever and have been focusing exclusively on music and sound effects. We all went our separate ways and learned our individual traits independently and they all complement each other.

It’s kind of surprising actually, not to knock any of our previous tech achievements, but Strange Attractors 2 is far and away above anything else we’ve created so far.

You guys are pretty much on the ground floor of GreenHouse, have you talked to other distribution services like Steam or Xbox LIVE Arcade?

We’d love to be on other platforms, but that’s dependent on a lot of other factors.

Why did you decide to make a sequel, rather than take one of your other ideas and make it into a full game?

Basically, because we got a lot of accolades from the independent gaming festival and we got nominated for Innovation in Gaming. We figured since people like it, why not polish it and maybe turn it into something that could sell. That, and we only had a month to work on the original Strange Attractors. We felt we could put some real polish behind it and create something fully realized if we had more time. We still really loved the gameplay and idea of it and wanted to see how far we could take the concept if fully realized. Hence, the sequel.

We actually set up an internal wiki to house all of our other game ideas. We’ve probably got like 30 to 40 in there right now. I’ve got insane amounts of really stupid game ideas constantly. Back when we were in Bret’s basement in high school we had the most grandiose ideas; we basically came up with the entire concept of EVE Online when we were like 17 years old. Of course, we had no resources, no experience and no way of ever making this game. So we thought we’d eventually make this great online game, and then EVE came out and we were like: “Fuck!”

So how does one of those ideas become a video game?

Most of the time they don’t, which is the problem.

Really, it’s a shit load of labor. I can’t imagine the number of hours Eric, Scott and Bret put into it. I primarily did music and sound effects, which is labor intensive in its own way. That’s not to say coding and 3D graphics aren’t artistic endeavors, but music is a thing I can’t force. I’m either inspired and I do a whole lot really quickly or I don’t. Eric, Scott and Bret put in a ton of time coding the engine and doing the art. I came in later with the music, sound effects and a lot of the game testing, which was intense. Since we didn’t have a budget, we each had to put in eight hours a day after work playing the game just to make sure everything worked.

We had been working on it for about two years when we got a call from GreenHouse saying, “we want you to be on our service, and can you have it done before PAX… like, in two months?” So we spent ridiculous amounts of time after that making sure it was polished. It was tough to find that time too because we each have jobs, families and lives outside the games industry.

There are groups of guys like us who do it out of pure passion and have to support it outside of work. Then there are other guys who run it more like a business, they have a plan and they get a bunch of loans and then hire people to do the work that they don’t do well. There’s a big difference in what can be accomplished depending on how much money and how much time you have. For example, if we were developing full time, it probably would have taken six months to make the game, instead it took two years.

If you look at a game like Project Aftermath, which was another PAX winner, it was made by a couple of ex-industry guys from the UK. They made it in two years, as well, but they did it full time and the quality looks like it could be on EA’s lineup.

Continued on page 3.

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