an interview with motion twin
Motion Twin is a developer based in Bordeaux, France.
Founded in 2000, the studio has developed over 150
free-to-play and browser based games. Motion Twin’s
first PC title, Dead Cells, has just been released on
Steam Early Access. You can see our hands-on preview
elsewhere in this issue.
We sat down with the Motion Twin team to ask them
some burning questions.
Motion Twin are a little different to most
developers, aren’t you? Tells us a little about how
you work and your approach to game development.
A little yeah, we’re a workers cooperative, so that
means there is no boss, we’re all equal partners,
earning the same amount of money and having an
equal say in all decisions impacting the company.
This means that everything we do is a very very
collaborative process and it also means that the
people in the company are usually quite polyvalent.
As we’re a small team we might have a single artist
responsible for the art and animation of a game, who
is also expected to have a deep understanding of the
technical considerations that his style will require.
The same goes for a developer who will be touching
everything from servers and back-end stuff to UI,
animation and FX, game design, you name it.
This means that whenever we approach a project it’s
based on what we want to do and what we can do
based on our competences. We usually start a project
with a very lean team, usually a coder and an artist.
That’s how Dead Cells began for example, two guys
with a mission to build a prototype that can unite the
team and get people inspired to work on the project.
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Inside the Motion Twin studios.
You’ve been developers for a long time, but most of
your work to date has been web-based and mobile