Gratuitous Space Battles dev recounts ‘talking to the community too much’
In our interview with Cliff Harris, the independent designer of Gratuitous Space Battles, he spoke about what it’s like to communicate with an active fan base directly as a developer, something that can be taken for granted when working at a bigger studio. Prior to his current stint as his own boss, Harris was at Elixir Studios (Evil Genius) and Lionhead Studios.
“I used to get told off a lot at Lionhead for talking to the community too much,” he told Destructoid. “They’d ask a question like ‘will you be able to do this in the game,’ and normally you can’t answer that. But if you’re the guy that coded it, well, yeah you can, I’m looking at the code right now, and I got a bit told off for that.
“But with Positech, because it’s me, there’s nobody to tell me what I can say or can’t say, and if someone suggests something on the forums and I think that’s a good idea then it will happen — as long as it’s feasible.”
It’s not just the big studios that can limit open discussion, according to Harris. “There’s nobody that I have to argue round, whereas with most companies, even with a lot of other indie companies, if there’s two or three of them, you won’t get that sort of discussion and response because they need to agree on whether or not they are going to do that. But here it’s a dictatorship of me, so I can just say yeah, that sounds great, I’ll put that in, or I won’t for whatever reason.”
