I recently had some time to chat with Chris Pelling, creator of Mayhem Intergalactic and founder of Inventive Dingo games.

In part 1 we discuss the history of the company and the game, as well as the development process.

[SG]: What inspired you to found Inventive Dingo and begin creating games? 

[CP]: Like most kids with an interest in computers, I played computer games quite a lot. I've also been programming as a hobby since I was quite young; I cut my teeth on Commander Keen 4 and QBasic, respectively. So I guess you could say game programming has always been an interest of mine. When I finished high school I was suddenly confronted with the question of what I was going to do with my life! I fell into doing a degree, but in the meantime I decided I needed to figure out what came next. Working behind a desk in a software company was the logical choice, but sounded somehow boring. So I decided to make a game and sell it, to see if it was possible to make a living that way.

I mean, how hard could it be, right?  *laughs*

I wish I could relate an amusing anecdote about the origin of the name Inventive Dingo, but the truth is rather boring. It came out of a brainstorm conducted while staring at a domain name registration form. I decided it had a bit of a ring to it, and the domain name was available, so I chose it. The End. Maybe I'll have to invent a more interesting story for future interviews.

[SG]: What was the driving force behind the making of Mayhem Intergalactic? The game has a somewhat familiar look to me but I can't place it. What was the inspiration?

[CP]: There were two main driving forces involved in the creation process: Sheer bloody-minded determination, and water. Many, many glasses of water. A hydrated programmer is a happy programmer. (Contrary to popular belief, caffeine is not necessary.) Gameplay-wise, the game was inspired by a whole string of turn-based space strategy games. Master of Orion is the obvious example, but I think the original inspiration was some game I played on OS/2 as a kid (the name of which has been long since forgotten). I don't remember anything about it except that it involved building ships and sending them to conquer other planets, and it was turn-based. And the easy-level AI thrashed me.

The other inspiration was the complexity of modern strategy games; particularly the RTS genre, where the number of things you have to memorise in order to play decently seems to be multiplied by 10 with every new release. I found this more tedious than interesting, so for Mayhem Intergalactic I deliberately stripped down the gameplay to the part that I found most entertaining: Grabbing a bunch of units and going marauding across the map! In Mayhem Intergalactic you don't even have to build anything or manage your economy. There is no economy. Ships just appear, and you send them to their deaths in waves of dozens. And you know what? It's fun! Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best.

[SG]: Did you create the game yourself or do you have others doing sound and graphics?

[CP]: I did the design work and programming myself. The arty bits (sounds, music, graphics) were cobbled together from a variety of sources.

[SG]: How long did the main development process take?

[CP]: This incarnation was started back in November 2005, and first publicly released in early July 2007, so that would make about 2.5 years of development time. Not all of this time was spent developing, though; I had longish breaks throughout. Actual development time was maybe the equivalent of a year's constant work.

The history of the game goes back a lot further than that though. I wrote a version of it for a game creation system in 2003 or so (whereupon it mouldered away on my hard drive until I got around to uploading it in late 2004). The graphics were nothing more than filled circles on a black background and a bunch of numbers flying around, but it was nevertheless fairly popular. The gameplay of this version was quite similar to the modern Mayhem Intergalactic.

Going back even further than that, I wrote a game with a similar setting back in my QBasic days. It was completely unbalanced, very slow-paced and therefore boring, and the AI was terrible, but the idea was there. I have no idea when this was; probably pre-2000. I'd check but I don't even know if I have a copy any more. I hope it's around here somewhere, it'd be good for a laugh... Needless to say, Mayhem Intergalactic is infinitely superior!

Read Part 2 tomorrow... 

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