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David Perry, one of the game industry’s longest-serving contributors and co-founder of cloud gaming service Gaikai, is returning to his roots in game design.
The veteran developer, who began his career in the early ‘80s, is currently building an iPad game along with a European indie studio.
Perry told Develop that the game is, for him, a part-time side-project, with day-to-day work remaining dedicated to Gaikai’s upcoming demo business.
“The game project is perfect fit for me because I don’t have to do it every day,” Perry said.
“Actually, me and the team tend to meet up at trade shows, huddle together, and talk about the design,” he said.
The unannounced title is being built on the Unity platform and is co-developed by a European indie studio, which for now is not being named.
Perry is holding off announcing the specifics of the project, aside from the claim that it “looks like no other iPad game”.
“There’s no big rush,” he said of the project. “We have discussions, the team I’m working with goes away and develops some more.”
Perry, who in the earlier sages in his career founded Shiny Entertainment, confessed that the urge to design games hasn’t faded away as he moved onto new business ventures.
“It’s a bit like when you’re watching a movie and you think ‘I wish that scene went more like this’. You can’t help it some times. That’s often how I feel when I’m playing games. So I’m not giving up on development.
“I have this romantic view of the game industry from back when I was developing – I had complete control, everything went through my fingers.
“These days it’s all about huge teams and I can’t help but feel like I’d be in charge of a giant ship with a wonky wheel. These days, ideas have to go through so many people at studios that the idea itself can become diluted.”
Perry’s focus during the day will remain on Gaikai, the upcoming cloud-gaming service that will – at first – offer rapid game demos on various websites.
Plans are in place to expand the business to a full game service, much like OnLive, at some stage next year.
The iPad side-project is not for profit, Perry added, as it will be published as part of the OneBigGame charity.
OneBigGame tasks developers to collaborate and build digital games with all profits going to charity.
The first contribution to the scheme was from Brighton-based studio Zoe Mode, which voluntarily developed Chime; a music-based-puzzle game that launched on XBLA late last year.
