The best laid plans …

GDC is a great place for budding developers to learn from other, more seasoned developers. During a postmortem focusing on the success of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, Capy president and co-founder Nathan Vella admitted the game ended up going over budget and past its planned launch late — it’s more common than you think in game development.

The original plan for Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP was a seven-month development cycle, with a budget of around $110,000. In the end, the game ended up costing “around $200,000” over the course of 18 months. As of today, 350,000 individuals have spun some vinyl.

After his talk, I got some face time with Vella to ask him about a personal curiosity: Twitter integration. Some games have caught flak for it, but the smart implementation and voice of the tweets in Superbrothers — written in the same narrative style of the game — caused a new trend in iOS gaming.

“The intention was always to give people the ability to broadcast something they enjoyed about the game,” Vella told me. “I love that about the game. I even loved it when people were talking shit about it like crazy. I think the Twitter part of it was important because people loved the dialogue, the way that Craig wrote it, and blast Twitter — it’s important to me and it’s important to the project, to know that we made something that somebody wants to put out there. And it was always a choice: you choose to press two buttons to tweet something, if you care about it. I would definitely make that call again.”

Finally, when asked by another attendee about a PC port of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, Vella slyly replied, “No comment on that question.”