Crossbeam Studios has been getting a lot of press lately for their smashing concept art and design outlines for games they plan on bringing to the Nintendo Revolution.

Having seen no screenshots or working builds of either Orb or Thorn I decided to contact Crossbeam and get the real scoop. Is it possible that a start-up development studio with no history to speak of can create games for hardware that very few people have ever even seen? While it’s still too early to tell what the future holds for Crossbeam and their games, they at least seem to be passionate and moving in the right direction. If all goes as planned we should see demos at E3.

4cr: Hello and thanks for taking the time to answer some questions. So, let’s get right to the point. You have announced that you are working on two games, hopefully for the Revolution. First, what is the experience among the team as far as game creation goes?

Crossbeam: Here I expected the first question to be “Tell us about who you are and what you do at CSE”. The team has numerous members that have worked, or are working, with other developers. However, past work experience is not something we look for. We look for people with talent and motivation. Many people have made light of the fact our Art Director and Concept Artist on Orb, Darcy Ripley, is still in school. She obviously has no experience in developing games, but in the end it doesn’t matter, as her work speaks for itself.

How far along are either Orb or Thorn?

Orb is just wrapping up a 5 year design cycle on the series basic design, and the detail design of the first game. Thorn is a new project that has only been in development for a few short months.

I’ve heard that these games started life on the PC and will be moved over to the Revolution once you can secure a development kit. How far have you gotten working on the PC and how likely do you think it is that you will secure a development kit?

We anticipate that shifting art assets to Revolution will be very easy, however, shifting the engine, coding, and recoding shaders could very well take a lot of time. This might mean that Revolution development could set us back at square one from a coding standpoint. As for how likely we feel a Revolution SDK will come our way, we think it very likely based on the companies that have expressed interest in our projects.

Since you do not yet have a Revolution dev kit, how are you compensating for the functionality of the controller?

On the PC we can’t emulate the Revolution controller. Not with any real accuracy anyway. What we are doing is the best we can with the mouse. What we hope to do is use the E3 demo to illustrate the basics of the game and then explain what we hope to do with the Revolution controller. Since the mouse is 2d and the remote is 3d, we’ll probably have to slow down gameplay to allow the mouse to act as all three spatial coordinates, meaning to shift from the 2d to 3d gameplay elements will require two actions instead of just one fluid movement. That is of course hypothetical, as what we are including in the E3 demo is still being decided.

Have you, or when will you, start shopping the game around for a publisher? I believe you have said that you would love to have Nintendo publish your title. How likely do you think that proposition is.

I’m not entirely sure how likely it is that Nintendo will publish our titles. We’ve had a lot of media and publisher interest in our projects in the past couple weeks, however, nothing from Nintendo as of yet, at least not officially. However, we fully intend to show our PC demo to interested parties at E3. That is when we start shopping the game around.

The concept artwork you have produced for these games is beautiful. Could you give us a break down of who is on the team and what they are responsible for?

Concept art for Orb is mostly done by our Art Director on the Orb team, Darcy Ripley. Other work on Orb is done by our resident Graphic Designer, Kerriann Hansen, or by the former CSE staff artist, Richard Luong (now at Ritual Entertainment). Thorn artwork was mostly done by Richard (so we are obviously in need of somebody to fill his place on that project).

Before we wrap this up, could you quickly lead us through a day at Crossbeam.
Seeing as how Crossbeam Studios does not have the revenue for a office yet, a typical day involves a lot of VoIP calls, posts on our staff forums and so forth. Also take into consideration the fact our staff are anywhere between California and Sweden and time of day becomes a big problem as well.

There is no such thing as a typical day here since the E3 crunch time kicked in for the Orb PC demo.

Finally, when can we hope to learn more about these games?

Before E3 for sure, however, like everything else in the industry (especially Nintendo related) we’ll have to say; wait for E3 for the bulk of the info.

Thank you for the questions, was a very different interview than most I’ve given. A big thank you to your readers for their interest, I hope you will all enjoy our games in the coming years.