An Interview with Dylan Fitterer March 9,2008 - Today we've got Dylan Fitterer In The Hot Seat.  Dylan is the man behind the excellent game Audiosurf.  He was nice enough to take time out of his packed schedule to answer a few questions for us about a range of topics.  So let's get right to it.

Gamer 2.0: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for us. I guess we’ll start with the obvious one; would you tell us a little about yourself? How long have you been playing games? Did you take any game-development specific courses?

Dylan Fitterer: Growing up, my brother and I spent a lot of time playing NES and SNES games together. We had a PC too, but games on it were (graphically) way behind what the consoles could do. Later I discovered deep games like X-Com, Civilization, and Magic the Gathering that really got me thinking about game systems. I haven't had any formal game development education, but I did take a Game Theory class towards my Economics degree.

Gamer 2.0: When did you decide you wanted to go from playing games to making them? Is Audiosurf your first game?

DF: In 1999 I quit my job to make games. The internet was booming and I'd picked up enough HTML to work part-time at web development. My dream was to clone Magic the Gathering while making it a realtime first-person shooter. That turned out to be too ambitious. Next, I tried a music-reactive first-person shooter and it also (eventually) collapsed. Then I launched bestgameever.com to release a free game every Friday. It felt great to actually release games! After 24 of them I chose my favorite (Tune Racer) and kept working on it until it was Audiosurf.

Gamer 2.0: Independent development seems to be on the rise lately. It’s been said that the days of the small group of friends making a game in their garage are over, but it seems as if Independent games are flourishing now. Have we come full circle back to the early 1980’s in that aspect?

DF: It sure feels that way except we're in an even better place now. With the web, developers can connect to players in a way that wasn't possible before and we don't even need a publisher.

Gamer 2.0: Do you still find time to play games these days? What are you playing now?

DF: I just bought a PS3 for Everyday Shooter and Flow – well worth it. My go-to game has been Team Fortress 2 for a while now. Demoman and I are good friends.

Gamer 2.0: Do you see larger development houses starting to scout out talent from smaller Indie teams?

DF: Sure that's happening - what better job interview is there? At the same time it keeps getting more and more possible for indies to stay on their own and it looks like more and more are doing so.

Gamer 2.0: What was the inspiration for Audiosurf? How much has it changed from your initial concept to the game that’s now out on Steam?

DF: Rez was a primary inspiration - I'm a huge music fan and wanted to do something like that with my own songs. I was also really attracted to the idea of generating content from music since it would offer the player so much design power. It spent a lot of time as shooters in various forms. That was hard to do since the natural thing to sync to the music is explosions and you never know when the player will fire a shot. Here's a screen from when it was about a surfer harpooning traffic.

Gamer 2.0: How big was the Audiosurf team? Do any members of your team have experience at larger development studios?

DF: My wife Elizabeth did game usability at Microsoft for a couple years and that experience was very helpful. We hired testers from our neighborhood to help find the sticking points and tune the difficulty. We also hired freelance help with graphics (Albert Park, Goran Delic, Flynn Joffray, Dan Plumb), 3D models (Paladin Studios), and music (Chris Chappel, Kevin Skaggs, Pedro Camacho). Everyone did excellent work and elevated the whole project several notches.

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