Between designing busty beer servers and crazy cowgirls, Mystery Studio’s own Gabriel Gambetta took a little time out of his hectic schedule to talk to us about Mystery Studio, the life of an indie game developer, and Uruguay.

CR: Tell us a little bit about your background, and what brought you to making casual games in particular.

Gabriel: Since I was a little kid I wanted to make computer games. I started doing stuff and learning in a ZX-Spectrum when I was 5 or 6, in 1986. However, since there never was a game industry in this country or in the region, making games remained just a childhood dream. You know - kids want to be firemen, superheroes, treasure hunters or game developers, but then grow up and get real jobs. So I started working as a programmer for local companies and studying Computer Engineering (a 5 year degree roughly equivalent to Computer Science).

In 2001 I had a classmate who had a similar background and a similar crazy dream about making games. We met in the Computer Graphics course (which I ended up teaching) and became friends. This started some sort of positive feedback loop between us, up to the point where we deluded ourselves into thinking we could actually make games! So in late 2002 we founded Mystery Studio, and the rest is history. Initially I was going to program and my partner Esteban was going to make the art. Nowadays we’re seven people, all family and friends (my sister, Esteban’s wife and brother, and so on) and our responsibilities have shifted a bit, but we keep the same very indie spirit we had 4 years ago.

Why casual games? Being hardcore players ourselves, we wanted to make hardcore games, the ones we wanted to play. However, we quickly realized that competing in terms of quality with most hardcore games, with our limited budget and expertise (remember that none of us had any prior game development experience) wasn’t realistic. We shifted our focus to casual games because their scope is more manageable by a small team, and because the channels to the customer are readily accessible, unlike hardcore games where it’s way more difficult to attract a distributor’s attention and/or you have to invest millions of dollars in marketing, which we certainly don’t have. We still have a few interesting ideas for non-casual games we’d love to make someday even if they’re not very financially successful, just for the pleasure of doing them. Unfortunately we haven’t got to the point where we can afford to do that yet.

CR: What about the game development scene in Uruguay? Do you find it challenging to be so far away from big game development areas like Seattle or Los Angeles? Do your games have a special “Latin American goodness” to them?

Gabriel: There is no game development scene in Uruguay . As far as I know there’s us making casual downloadable games, and two other tiny companies doing cell phone games and simple flash games respectively, so we’re the only local company doing this. It isn’t so challenging now, but this was the most difficult obstacle to overcome before founding Mystery Studio. When you grow up in a place where nobody does X, and nobody believes X can be done, you end up believing it too and not even realizing it’s a false belief, or a belief at all - it’s The Reality (TM). As Morpheus [of The Matrix fame] so eloquently put it, “ you were born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch… a prison for your mind ”. Realizing there was a prison in the first place was the single biggest obstacle we faced. Once we got over that using lots of self-confidence and a healthy dose of lunacy, the rest wasn’t so hard. Except quitting our day jobs maybe – “ You’re leaving your well paid and prestigious job to do WHAT? ”

Working here isn’t really challenging - thanks to email and teleconferencing we can be in touch with our partners very effectively. It does feel somewhat isolated after a while. This is why I had such a great time in last year’s Casuality - for three days I actually felt part of the industry, I talked face to face with so many people I had known for years, we went to parties and had some drinks together… there’s no substitute for that, no matter how good your webcam is.

We’re not aware of any particular Latin Americanism to any of our games, but since we live in a culturally different place, our games most probably have some kind of unique flair, whether we like it or not. This is a question we should be asking you, not the other way around!

CR: OK, Betty’s Beer Bar. What’s the story behind making this game? Why a bar? Why Beer? Why Betty?

Gabriel: This is a difficult question because when we made Betty’s Beer Bar you could count the games with female protagonists serving customers to build their own businesses with the sixth finger of each hand, and after the flurry of similar games with ” Help (female name) build her own (business type) empire ” as story, maybe with the ” while (evil entity) wants to put her out of business ” variant we first used in Wild West Wendy, it can be hard to actually remember why we did what we did instead of rationalize it in terms of how successful the genre has become. I guess not being part of the industry and not having previous experience worked in our favor that time, allowing us to think way outside the box.

A female protagonist was the logical consequence of learning that 65% of the customers were female. Having a female protagonist meant the game couldn’t be abstract - if I recall correctly, the most successful games at the time were Bejeweled and Collapse, but we couldn’t do that, we had to have more people. So we put wacky characters to drive Betty crazy. While we had played Tapper in our youth (I was a grumpy old 22 year old when we made Betty’s Beer Bar), it was certainly a very loose influence - I think the most important element we took from Tapper was serving beer instead of something else, which may explain why we did it when none of the members of the team likes beer in real life.

Being unknown people in a practically unknown country and having made a game which effectively invented a genre had its ups and downs. We approached the distributors and we got varied reactions. Some ignored us. Very few believed in us and gave us a chance - most notably Big Fish, to whom we’re still grateful. One other big portal which shall remain nameless rejected it saying “nobody wants a game where you have to work”. I guess they were wrong.

CR: What about Pirate Poppers? Tell us about working with a big publisher (Playfirst). How is that different from trying to build and sell games on your own?

Gabriel: The funny thing about Pirate Poppers is that we didn’t actually intend to make it. We had some downtime between “real” projects. I wanted to add a few features to our game engine, such as hardware accelerated renderers and particle systems. We had a new 3D artist and we wanted to give him some game development experience. So I started writing the renderer and a demo of hardware-accelerated rotating sprites following a smooth, subpixel-precise curve. This evolved into a somewhat playable prototype, up to the point where we said “hey, we could actually finish and sell this”.

With several games in the pipeline, very limited staff, and no desire to grow fast, we faced the option of either becoming experts in marketing and sales, or outsourcing these tasks. Having engineering degrees and no big interest in learning sales, we decided to outsource the sales part. We finished Pirate Poppers on our own, and once it was done we approached PlayFirst. PlayFirst had a list of improvement suggestions, most of which made sense and actually made Pirate Poppers a much better game than it was.

We’re now working with PlayFirst in other games. Having an external company involved in your design decisions isn’t being completely free to do whatever you want, but since PlayFirst gives us great creative freedom, we don’t feel limited either. Besides, partnering with an US-based company also helps overcome some of the cultural differences I mentioned earlier, most notably the different sensibilities the public has towards certain topics, which we don’t fully understand, and in some cases don’t even know they exist.

CR: Mystery Studio is a sort of quintessential “indie development” studio. Maybe you can tell our readers what it’s actually like to be a couple of guys making casual games. What are the personal challenges you face? What is a day in the life of an indie developer like?

Gabriel: It’s like a very exciting rollercoaster, but without the nausea. Every day is an adventure. I wake up every morning not knowing what new crazy proposal I’ll find in my inbox.

We’re a very small team. We all have our main roles - 2D artist, 3D artist, musician, and programmer. We also have secondary roles - for example, everyone has input in the game design process, we all give our opinions about the art as it’s being done, and so on. An advantage of having so few people is that we have instant feedback about what we do. It also helps us have a very low bureaucracy overhead and very personalized communication, which lets us be extremely productive. Our ad-hoc meetings are informal, short, and to the point. This is part of the “corporate culture” I work to establish now, so it can remain this way even if the company grows substantially.

One of the biggest personal challenges I face is having a great deal of responsibility. My business card says “Director”, but I wear a lot of hats - I’m the lead tech guy, I make and maintain our game engine, I write game code, and I write the design docs after the meetings. I’m also the project manager, business dev guy, finance guy, tech support guy, webmaster, and I sometimes make the coffee. So I feel I carry a lot of weight on my shoulders. I have an engineering degree but I’m in a position where a lot more than the tech side depends on me, and I have no formal training for that. Knowing that I’m The Boss (TM) and people depend on me to make a living is sometimes stressful and exhausting. On the other hand, it’s also extremely rewarding - we take a retail box of one of our games and we know it’s our game, we made it, and it’s our accomplishment.

Because of all my responsibilities, I’ve become a workaholic. On weekdays I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, except for a few hours when I go to the university to teach a couple of courses or when I go to karate classes. It used to be worse - I worked seven days a week, but it was having a negative effect in my energy and my morale. This year I decided not to work on weekends, and this decision has had a very positive impact.

I also have a problem delegating tasks, but I’m learning to overcome it. For three years I was the only programmer in the team, and being very concerned about elegance and style in code, I thought I’d never be able to delegate programming tasks for anyone. Fortunately, one of my friends joined the team as a programmer a few months ago. As a friend I trust him and since he’s doing a great job, he’s been working practically unsupervised lately.

It wasn’t easy to leave the comfort and security of my day job a few years ago, but there hasn’t been a day where I regretted my decision. Being indie involves uncertainty, and there’s no question about it. But the excitement of not knowing what lies ahead and realizing that the future is pretty much up to you more than compensates for the uncertainty.

CR: So what have you guys got working now? What’s the next big thing from Mystery Studio?

Gabriel: I could answer that question, but I’d have to kill you. At the moment we’re working on three casual games in different stages of development, and we have plenty of interesting ideas we hope to turn into games in the near future. As I mentioned before, we also have ideas for less casual and way more original games, but that’s more of a long term plan.

CR: Well, seeing as we’re pretty partial to living (how else would we get our gaming fix?), I guess we’ll just wait patiently like everyone else. Sounds exciting, though, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what you come out with! Thanks again for taking the time to talk to us.

To see more of Mystery Studio and the games they make, head over to their website at http://www.mysterystudio.com/. Make sure to check back soon for more great developer interviews, special features, and reviews.