Laurent Coulon is the CEO of Liquid Dragon Studios, an innovative Indie Studio that’s brought us titles like Word Krispies and Winds of Athena. Their games tend to have very distinctive motion mechanics which gives them a unique feel. Laurent is chatting with us today about why that is and where Liquid Dragon comes from.

CR: Tell us a little bit about Liquid Dragon: Who are you and where did you come from? What brought you to casual games?

Laurent: Patrick Betremieux and I founded Liquid Dragon in March of 2004. We both had quite a few years in the game industry under our belt having both been lead programmers at different game companies. We met at Surreal Software a while back while working on Drakan for the PS2 and had kept in touch since then. My main motivation for creating the company was that I wanted to have business cards with the title C.E.O. on them, a request that all my previous employers surprisingly kept turning down. I think Patrick’s motivation was nobler, he just wanted to make heaps of cash. Don’t believe indie developers that feed you nonsense about seeking creative freedom and experimenting new directions for game design. They’re all lying. We’re really all in it for the cash and the glory.

Nine out of ten game start-ups fold within the first year of their existence. One thing they typically have in common is that they are composed of a small group of highly motivated and idealistic people who all set out to make “The best and biggest game ever”. In our original business plan, we agreed that we didn’t want to become another casualty on the list and that the best approach to those highly unfriendly odds was to opt for an incremental development model. Basically an approach where we would start by making low financial risk small-scale games that would allow us to build our core technology and progressively evolve to develop bigger and bigger titles as our engine and company matured.

Of course things didn’t go quite that way and we still ended up spending about 1.5 years just developing technology. By that point in time we had invented a brand new method for simulating fluid dynamics in real time and we were very conscious of the fact that even though the technology we had developed had no equivalent in the world it would still take a lot of work to turn it into a final product. We both decided we needed to create some quick cash flow to keep going and that is how we turned ourselves towards casual games. Casual games typically have a small enough budget that we could afford to develop one independently and we also though they would be a good way to leverage at least a small subset of our technology. And of course they matched our business philosophy of making incrementally bigger games.

CR: You are in Seattle, ground zero for casual game development. What’s it like sharing a city with the likes of Popcap, Real, Big Fish, and Sandlot? Why has Seattle become the holy land for casual games?

Laurent: A lot of the bigger casual game companies are made of former big PC and console game developers that got tired of crunching. I don’t think Seattle attracted casual game developers from somewhere else, they just emerged naturally out of the high programmer and game artist concentration in the area.

CR: We loved the fluid movement dynamic in both Word Krispies and Winds of Athena. What is your fascination with fluids?

Laurent: When we started working on our first prototype we knew we needed to have something really unique to make us stand out of the crowd. Besides, nobody had ever found a robust solution to do fluid physics in real time on average consumer hardware and the challenge was just too appealing to pass. I naively thought it wouldn’t be that hard. It turned out that even at the academic level solving the interface between air and water in a generic way was still mostly an unresolved problem.

After a year and a half of banging our heads on the wall we finally came up with a brand new technology to solve water physics in 2D and 3D. We then developed a prototype around it for a game called Overflow. Unfortunately although the technology wowed most publishers we showed it to, the prototype failed to get their interest. This is when we decided to fall back on a simpler product that would use only a very small portion of the technology we had developed.

CR: Tell us about the experience of working with a publisher (Encore) on Word Krispies. How was it different than developing a game on your own?

Laurent: Encore is not strictly speaking the publisher of Word Krispies. They have the exclusive distribution rights for the title but hold no rights to the I.P. or the product content otherwise. We had Word Krispies 90% complete by the time we finalized our deal with Encore, so most of the development time was not any different than for our previous product.

We did however work closely with Robert Coshland at Encore during the last month of development of the title and that relation was extremely positive. Robert came at us with quite a few suggestions on how to improve the product and although we initially had the typical defensive reaction that all developers have when a publisher tries to tell them how to make a game, we eventually had to agree that most of them were very good ideas. Collaborating with Encore was surprisingly non-painful, the back-and-forth dialog was very honest and open and their contribution eventually led to a much higher quality product than the one we would have shipped on our own.

CR: Winds of Athena was a truly original design – and we don’t se that very often in casual games. Where did you get the idea, and how did it develop?

Laurent: Winds of Athena is basically an example of how not to design a game. We were frustrated at our Overflow prototype having been rejected and wanted to use the technology we had worked so hard on. So we ended up brainstorming ideas to make a game around a specific technology. Something that most experienced designers will tell you is a bad idea. The reason is that it tends to lead to game designs that feel forced. In our case I think it worked out quite well mostly because the potential of the technology is so large that it did not constrain the game design much.

We were originally aiming for a more common place design were the player simply dropped down obstacles to guide the currents. But being able to drag currents with the mouse was one of our early debugging tools and the loss of that freedom in the game felt frustrating. We wanted the player to be able to play and experience the water as much as possible. From there the idea of playing a God over the map came naturally. The Greek theme came mostly as a reaction against making a pirate themed game. The one motto we stuck to the whole way with Liquid Dragon Studios was “Never do something that’s already been done” and I think Winds of Athena reflects this quite well.

CR: So what are you working on now? What’s the next big thing from Liquid Dragon?

Laurent: In the spirit of our incremental growth business model we are now working on a mid-size 3D PC game title. This is our first title that is not self financed. I cannot disclose any details about the I.P. yet, I can however tell you that the game takes place over a huge ocean area. We have spent a lot of time developing new technology from the ground up to make the best looking 3D ocean simulation seen in games yet. We are quite pleased with the results so far. We’d love to get a chance to eventually port that technology to a next-gen console next.

CR: That sounds exciting! We’ll be looking forward to checking it out. Thanks for talking to us today, Laurent!

You can see more of Liquid Dragon and their games at their website, http://www.liquiddragon.com/. Be sure to stop by and have a look! Check back at Casual Review soon for more developer interviews, features, and reviews.