Piece Of Pie Studios

Having already worked for such giants in the industry as EA and Sony, Yacine Salmi already knows the work that’s required in making a hit release. Tired of working on others’ projects, and wanting complete control over his own, Salmi formed Piece Of Pie Studios and is currently hard at work on physics-based platformer Swimming Under Clouds with Mikaël Aguirre, the artist known as Orioto who we interviewed about his beautiful videogame artworks last month. We asked Yacine about Swimming Under Clouds and his company, and it’s clear that he thinks the indie scene is in very rude health indeed.

infinitecontinues: Hi Yacine. Who are you and what do you do?

Yacine Salmi: I’m a 29-year old programmer ex-pat living in Munich, Germany. I am working on my first title, Swimming Under Clouds, a collaboration with Orioto.

ic: How did your company, Piece Of Pie Studios, come about?

YS: After several years in the traditional games industry, I finally got tired of putting in long hours on other people’s projects. I traded a steady salary for the opportunity to work on my own games, thus forming my little studio.

ic: Lift the lid a little on what it was like working for Havok, Sony and EA. What projects were you working on? What were your roles?

YS: I worked on my first game with EA (Burnout Revenge). My responsibilities were not very exciting, mostly front end work, and memory card management. I got my first taste of how brutal development can get on a game with a yearly iteration. That was definitely a learning experience.

At Evolution Studios (now part of Sony), I was the lead animation programmer on Motorstorm. It was one of the most rewarding periods of my early career. Being responsible for an entire area was a huge honour. I learned so much, and got access to unreleased hardware. It was very exciting. This was also the time I first started to dabble in physics programming.

At Havok, I worked primarily on the new Destruction product, where I continued my development in physics. Havok has some of the top physics minds in the industry. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn and further develop my skills in programming and physics.

ic: Now contrast that with your new role as founder of Piece Of Pie Studios. Outline a typical day for yourself. Sell it to those with similar dreams to start up their own studios!

YS: The main difference in working for yourself is that you work on your own projects. Total freedom, but also complete responsibility and risk. You must motivate yourself and others. You must take on the financial risks. You must find ways to motivate yourself when things aren’t going well. And the whole time, you have to maintain a realistic outlook and expectation on your business and product.

Typical days varies with my focus. If I have a biz dev task to take care of, that can easily chew up an entire day. Responding to emails, reaching out to publishers and console manufacturers, preparing documents, all of it eats up valuable time and mental energy. It’s not easy to multitask biz dev activities with coding (or designing).

The best days are when I can simply bury myself in coding tasks all days with no interruptions. Those days are rare.

A typical day involves getting up, going to the office (which is conveniently in my house), checking my mail while eating breakfast, answering anything urgent and diving in to coding. In the afternoon, I will usually try to chat a bit with Mikaël, discussing whatever art, code or design issues we’re currently facing. Then back into coding.

Being an indie is easy. Save some money, quit your job, and work on a game. Being a successful indie is a lot harder (and something I am still trying to reach). It requires a lot of hard work, dedication and decent planning. Shit always takes longer than you expect. Always. Being organized also helps quite a bit.

ic: What is Swimming Under Clouds? Where did the idea first originate from?

YS: Swimming Under Clouds is a fun 2D physics-based platformer. You take control of a ball of water with a fish inside. Your goal is to reunite the little fish with its owner, a distraught little girl. The game mixes physical and platforming challenges with a fluid movement system and Orioto’s beautiful artwork to create a fresh experience.

My original goal was simply to make a solid (realistic) 2D fluid simulation. I always believed that if I had a cool physics fluid simulation, then making some interesting games (gameplay-wise) would come naturally. Developing tech before gameplay is not the orthodox method of game development, but that’s the path I chose. I was a lot more interested in creating new tech, because without it, the game wouldn’t be much fun.

Once the tech was in place, the basic premise of the game evolved as I experimented with different waysof controlling and interacting with the water. When Mikaël joined the project, we refined the gameplay further, and he started crafting the story, background and look for the game.

Screens from Swimming Under Clouds

ic: How did you come across Mikael’s work? What convinced you that he was the right artist for Swimming Under Clouds? Did he immediately accept your invitation to work with you?

YS: Meeting Mikaël was a very fortuitous event. Another friend had helped with the art in the first demo (which was really cool of him). Afterwards, he pointed me to Mikaël’s DeviantArt page as he was a fan. I had already seen some of his previous art before, but never connected the name.

I wasn’t going to reach out to him because I didn’t think I could get someone so talented to work with me. But the same week he blogged about how he really wanted to start working on games. He wanted a project where he could actually craft the artistic vision. And that’s exactly what I was looking for in a partner, someone to handle the entire artistic side – an artistic director. So I reached out, we talked, and talked and talked, and agreed to work together. Our ideas meshed really well together.

Visually, I wanted the game to become a moving version of his art work. He loved the feel of the water blob and the physics. It’s worked out well.

ic: What sort of response have your promotional materials had on the public? Are you pleased with the amount of buzz you are generating?

YS: Last time we released a video was back in November last year for our igf submission. The response was good, with a nice preview piece on beefjack. We even got a mention on tigsource and indiegames.com which made me positively giddy.

I also showed the game publicly for the first time in May at a local Munich meetup. That was both nerve-wracking and exhilarating. People liked it though, so that was cool.

Since the igf video, we haven’t really pushed things hard on the promotional side, releasing a few pics and tidbits through the site and on FB/Twitter. We’ve been keeping our heads low and working, but we’ll be releasing more material “soon”, this time using a proper HD video of the game.

ic: There doesn’t seem to be any mention of a platform for Swimming Under Clouds as yet. Is that being deliberately kept under wraps, or is that simply a case of waiting for a publisher?

YS: A bit of both really. Between XBLA and PSN, we have a preferred target platform, and we are open to both, but our plans our not finalized. We don’t want to announce anything until we know for sure. While we are open to working with a publisher, we are also pursuing the self-publishing route in parallel. With or without a publisher this game will be released on our target console platform.

ic: How do you view the state of the current indie scene at the moment? From the outside looking in, it seems like it’s gathering pace, with top games being made available for a fraction of a big retail release. What’s your take on it?

YS: I’m just amazed by the indie scene. It’s incredibly vibrant right now. Every year, more and more amazing indie games are made. And every year, the barrier for entry is lowered. With all the tools and support communities available (the indie world is incredibly friendly), anyone can make a game if they want to.

And the opportunities to be an indie and earn an income continue to multiply. Digital distribution, government funding, patronage systems, donation ware, XBLA, WiiWire, iPhone, PSN, Steam. There are so many possibilities for indies and that in turn has fostered a diverse ecosystem of indie games.

And some of the higher profile releases have definitely caught the traditional industry’s eye. People are learning that there are different ways to make and market a game. One interesting consequence is that more and more publishers/developers are trying to get involved in the indie world.

We’re definitely in a golden age of indie, and things will only continue to get better.

ic: Finally, if you could have worked on any one game in the history of videogames, which would it have been? And why?

YS: Super Mario World on the SNES. That game marked me so much growing up. It’s just so damn good. The first three Mario games were great on their own merits, but SMW took things to the next level. Yoshi, the cape, secret exits, star world!?! To take something that was so good and make it even more amazing? I would love to have been associated with that. That game has stood the test of time.

Check out the website for Swimming Under Clouds here, and then go over to the Facebook page to get updates for the game. You can also follow Piece Of Pie Studios on Twitter here.