Jeff Minter on Space Giraffe and an army of two (that is the dev team)

Gamasutra got to talking with Llamasoft‘s Jeff Minter to talk about making Space Giraffe (and hope the visuals don’t induce seizures… kidding), and you’d be surprised at what goes on behind the scenes. Well, for starters, the core dev team is really an army of two: Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin. Well, there is an extended team of contributors that he’s grateful for, but at the core, it’s just the two of them.

So if you’re wondering why it’s taking a bit of time for this visual menagerie to hit Xbox Live Arcade, well, there’s one of them.

He also revealed why the game’s called Space Giraffe: it’s sort of accidental demand. He posted a picture of “a little creature” and a giraffe at a watering hole – absolutely nothing to do with what you see in the game, we guess – on a forum thread called The Space Giraffe, and suddenly, he says gaming site suddenly reported that he was working on a game called “Space Giraffe“! And that’s how it stuck.

Who knows if the giraffe and “the little creature” made it into the game? Other stuff you might like to know:

• Don’t worry, no matter how weird the levels start to look, Jeff says “if you’re actually in there playing it, you can still read it.” So the screenshots really can’t do any justice to this game; we need visuals.
• Jeff Minter loves the visual power he’s got with the Xbox 360. He especially loves pixel shading.
• Each level in Space Giraffe has its own graphical theme.
• This is a self-funded game, because they wanted to maximize returns: “We didn’t want to take any funding… We figured we’d go out on a limb and self-fund, and then hopefully do better when it’s released.”
• Contractually speaking, Llamasoft is still very much third party; they can code for the PS3 and Wii if they wanted to – except for the light synthesizer, which is contractually restricted to Microsoft.
• And Jeff would one day like to work with the Wii; he’d like “to get cracking” on another Xbox Live Arcade game before then.
• Yes, Jeff does own llamas. As pets.

Gamasutra got to talking with Llamasoft‘s Jeff Minter to talk about making Space Giraffe (and hope the visuals don’t induce seizures… kidding), and you’d be surprised at what goes on behind the scenes. Well, for starters, the core dev team is really an army of two: Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin. Well, there is an extended team of contributors that he’s grateful for, but at the core, it’s just the two of them.

So if you’re wondering why it’s taking a bit of time for this visual menagerie to hit Xbox Live Arcade, well, there’s one of them.

He also revealed why the game’s called Space Giraffe: it’s sort of accidental demand. He posted a picture of “a little creature” and a giraffe at a watering hole – absolutely nothing to do with what you see in the game, we guess – on a forum thread called The Space Giraffe, and suddenly, he says gaming site suddenly reported that he was working on a game called “Space Giraffe“! And that’s how it stuck.

Who knows if the giraffe and “the little creature” made it into the game? Other stuff you might like to know:

• Don’t worry, no matter how weird the levels start to look, Jeff says “if you’re actually in there playing it, you can still read it.” So the screenshots really can’t do any justice to this game; we need visuals.
• Jeff Minter loves the visual power he’s got with the Xbox 360. He especially loves pixel shading.
• Each level in Space Giraffe has its own graphical theme.
• This is a self-funded game, because they wanted to maximize returns: “We didn’t want to take any funding… We figured we’d go out on a limb and self-fund, and then hopefully do better when it’s released.”
• Contractually speaking, Llamasoft is still very much third party; they can code for the PS3 and Wii if they wanted to – except for the light synthesizer, which is contractually restricted to Microsoft.
• And Jeff would one day like to work with the Wii; he’d like “to get cracking” on another Xbox Live Arcade game before then.
• Yes, Jeff does own llamas. As pets.