Walking through the door and gathering my breath (because in the heat of the moment RUNNING up four flights of stairs seemed like a really great idea) I slid into Capybara studios. I had never been in a game studio and did not know what to expect in a business environment that focused on fun and smiles. Everyone looked focused at their posts, though glancing across most screens revealed that they were viewing vibrant animated cutscenes and video game footage, which unlike your campus library this was actually what they were supposed to be doing. The door was already open, and no one really seemed to notice I walked in. I called out for Nathan, co-founder, president and the person I had contacted. He was standing pretty much to the left of me by the window. He walked forward and I asked if I could speak with the basic brain trust of the group. He laughed, heralded Kris Piotrowski, the creative director, when we quietly shuffled into another room. The room had, like, all the video games, a few glowing awards, a poster for Rockstar's The Warriors (a personal favourite so brownie points) and snuggled into the corner a mustached blow up sex doll they told me was their very unofficial mascot.

In case you don't keep up with all the little ways Ontario has been spending their money, the government announced that they would be investing well into the millions of dollars in an initiative to attract, specifically, video game designers. So far it has reeled in big studio Ubisoft, creators of Rayman, Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell. A savoury house, yes, but as it currently stands they already had a main Canadian location, so don't expect it to usher in any new canuck bragging rights. Capybara, however, is just on the other end. Small, young and just on the horizon of releasing their first console title on Playstation's PSN for the PS3 BTW, Critter Crunch, a puzzle game about eating and barfing that was previously welcomed on mobile platforms, now receiving an HD makeover. So what, pray tell, do the people at Capybara think about Ontario making the skrilla rain for Ubisoft, and what it could mean for Toronto's game dev community?

Take it away Nathan.

"The local game scene got a ton of attention when the Ubisoft deal came through but I think for us it’s been around for a while. N+ by Metanet, those guys are just down on Queen Street, Jonathan Mak of Everyday Shooter will soon be in the building. You have groups like The Hand Eye Society bringing everyone together and community is the theme, teaching people who don’t know how to make games how to make games and then there’s tonnes of awesome individuals, we could probably spend about four hours listing all the awesome people and the awesome things they’ve done in the area. You just get the benefit of having someone to talk to, working out your idea if it doesn’t work for you, and you also get the benefit of just that comradely."

Do you

Wait I need to stop for a second.

Okay.

So.

It has been recently brought to my attention by others on the team that when I type in all caps as if I was screaming as loud as I can go when I recorded these is hilarious. So in the spirit of being critter crunk, sit back, breathe in and let your imagination determine the volume of my voice. Alright, good thing that is out of the way.

And now continuing on with King Frankenstein's, Critter Crunk~

HEY, SO GUY DO YOU LIKE THINK THAT ALL THIS ATTENTION WILL AT LEAST BRING CLOSET DEVELOPERS OUT OF THEIR DANG SHELL YO

"Here I think people are pretty much already out there, a lot of people are just doing their own thing already. I think with all the attention based on Ubisoft I think it will be interesting because it will cause a lot more people to come to this city to make games, some will love big studio work, someone who will love to be part of a two hundred person team working on a big retail video game. Some of these people are not going to like it, some of them will come to us or Metanet or any other smaller studio or start their own. There’s going to be this weird by-product of sucking a lot of developers in and the ones that don’t gel perfectly will be spat back out."

THEN HOPEFULLY WE'LL BE A MORE RECOGNIZABLE SCENE CAUSE WE BE REPPIN AN' SHIT

"Oh yeah!  I’ve been asked a bunch of times about Ubisoft and what’s my kind of opinion on them coming and what do I think about it and I believe there are some negatives that you can’t help, they’re a giant studio but they aren’t some mean cloud. As much as there are downsides as long as we are bringing in more people to make more games it’s good, you can’t really find many harsh criticisms for Ubisoft or the government for bringing them here. Not to mention we’ve been making a new Heroes of Might and Magic DS game with Ubisoft and they’ve been super cool to us."

SO WE AIN'T TALKING BOUT LIKE A GIANT STEEL SPIDER MOVING INTO THE BLOCK

It was at this point that my always trusty tape recorded decided to tell me that one out of two bars actually meant no out of two bars and made the same incessant beeping noise it makes whenever it does... anything at all. Not one to be so easily defeated by technology I tried the waters of my camera's recording abilities for the first time. That said.

SO YO, ANOTHER RECENT DEVELOPMENT IN THE INDIE GAME COMMUNITY, TORONTO AND OR OTHERWISE IS THE RISE OF DOWNLOADABLE GAMES. STARTING TO FEEL LIKE NO GOOD DEED GOES UNREWARDED Y'KNOW, GAMES THAT WERE FREE OR OBSCURE GETTING CONSOLE RELEASES, LIKE N+ AND CAVE STORY

"Yeah, and I played the new Wii Cave Story and it’s ssssssssooo good."

KRIS QUIT SITTIN THERE AND START YAPPING BOUT SHIT

"I think it’s great, I think it’s created a better sized platform for smaller studios. I think even just going back four years or so starting a studio meant a whole different thing than starting one now. There are a lot of people now starting off as much smaller teams because the end goal isn’t creating the next Bungie or Bioware game. Now you have downloadable stages, you have iTunes, you have Steam, PSN, XBL, WiiWare and to a lesser extent DSi, you have these things that make for much more financially viable sort of platform that’s stilted towards much smaller games that, at least now, seem to be weighing more towards uniquely artistic over the commercial stuff. When you make a commercial game you have a lot less freedom, you have to make something that’s very market driven or else you are taking a gigantic risk on a project with so much weight on it. I think the most progressive game design, the things actually pushing the medium foreword are seen right now are in these smaller downloadable spaces."

To which Nathan added, "It makes it a lot less scary to make crazy shit, if you made crazy shit four years ago it would probably be a PC downloadable title and it would probably be free, but now you can put a small investment in. Well, I don’t know what you consider small, and still try to hit this small niche group and you can still make money off that and who knows, it may even get bigger than that. N+ is a great example of a game that is punishingly disgustingly hard and yet you still see totally non-hardcore people getting into it."

I SEE DUDES IN LECTURE CLASS HITTING THAT SHIT UP LIKE A PINATA COVERED IN BEETLES

"For sure, but at the same time you have like, my girlfriend’s little brother who’s eighteen, he’s a gamer gamer for sure but he’s not like the type of guy who would go online to find freeware titles. He just saw it on Xbox Live, thought it looked neat and bought it. And I didn’t even tell him to."

THEY GROW UP SO FAST~

Kris then added, "I think this isn’t a trend, it’s only going to continue. Downloadable is becoming a much bigger priority with retail becoming more and more difficult. You see Sony doing a lot of this, releasing Wipeout HD on PSN despite there being no reason that game couldn’t be a full retail release. That movement has removed a lot of the initial barriers for independent developers. It seems that certain games just have a better chance at succeeding in a downloadable state."

YA FOR SURE AIN'T ABOUT TO SEE ANY FUTURE BARGAIN BIN GAMES CHARGING FULL DAMN RETAIL FOR A THREE HOUR RIDE

"Exactly, I would hate to walk into a Wal Mart and see Critter Crunch in a bargain bin. I would rather see it on sale on PSN, even if it’s the exact same price it’ll still feel totally different."

At this point my camera too had decided to disappoint me, not due to batteries oh no, but due to memory card space. Now see the only other thing on the camera was one, just one single photo I took of my friend's wedding, so you can imagine the slithering defeat I was feeling, knowing I'd have to slow this train down so my pen and paper express could keep up. But these guys, oh no, these guys, they would see to that. Like a mighty eager hunter, they tracked down some AAAs, scavenging every remote they eventually found one, one that they did not even know what function it served, and passed me mighty power dingies. So we gracefully continued.

SO NATHAN, TO WHICH I ADDRESS BECAUSE IN TURN I KNOW DUE TO POWERS I PREFER NOT TO DISCUSS FORETELL IT WILL BE YOU TO FIRST COVER THIS QUESTION, HOW'D Y'ALL GET STARTED

"After we started meeting weekly at Paupers Pub we decided to make some cell phone games because it was cheap. We thought it was good you know, small games, great way to figure out if we could do it and after a while we figured out that we actually COULD do it. Made a couple of games, one which actually ended up getting published, then started a studio when we convinced Disney to let us make a mobile game for the movie Cars, we got that game without an office or staff or computers or anything we just all worked at home in our spare time."

GAMES LIKE THAT JUST GOTTA GET MADE YO

"I have no idea why they gave it to us, honestly no clue."

"We had a good pitch." Kris interjected.

"Yeah we did have a good pitch. I think we probably pretended we had an office. We spent a long while on mobile games. We kind of made mobile games not only to step our foot in the door but to really get some experience developing games. But the end goal was always to do full games and games for gamers, so after we got really frustrated with mobile games and the business of being an indie mobile game developer, which by the way is pretty much the worst idea ever. We decided to do some iPhone stuff and DS stuff and some console downloadable stuff and now that’s what we’re doing right now. We got Critter Crunch for the PSN coming out, we got Might and Magic Clash of Heroes coming out, we are starting a new iPhone project and a Wiiware project with some other stuff on the side as well, and that’s where we wanted to be. We really wanted it to be this way, with HD, with crazy visuals, it’s why we worked so hard to make this studio."

HEY I GOT AN IDEA, LET'S TALK ABOUT BARFING

"The original ending of the cell phone version of Critter Crunch, spoiler alert, is Biggs the main character returning back to his family and barfing in their mouths, this big glorious finale."

Kris adds, "He regurgitates all the jewels he ate and over the credits is a big barfing scene."

"We always thought that was uhm, really fucking funny so when this version came around we were thinking 'so okay what is the best way to introduce people who have never seen this game before' and we decided to instead of having the end of the game being barfing in your son’s mouth to actually make that a key component. Hopefully that would draw in people who otherwise never have the chance to experience that."

WHY BUY ANY OL' PUZZLE GAME WHEN YOU COULD PLAY A PUZZLE GAME WITH BARFING INTO ANOTHER PERSON'S MOUTH

"People like different things, and you know what, it is both a gameplay element and it is barfing in something’s mouth. It’s a win win situation."

"It’s actually neat how people latched on to that concept. The signature thing  about the game now is this guy barfing a rainbow into another guy’s mouth."

"And that’s pretty awesome, it’s something we’re very proud of."

"More of that to come in the future."

"Yeah!~"

BARFING IN TWO GUY'S MOUTHS

"Barfing and uhm, crapping."

"No"

"Crapping into some guy’s mouth."

"I don’t think we want to get into that territory."

"Part two."

"Barfing has just became a great hallmark of this game and gaming. It’s awesome that people liked the barfing because I like it. I think it is funny."

THAT'S MY STANCE AND I'M STICKIN WITH IT! THERE ARE ENOUGH FART JOKES, TIME TO MIX IT UP, VIVA LA BARF JOKES

Kris responds, "I think Castle Crashers had us covered for fart and poo jokes. They missed a key joke, the barf joke. We've hit a niche market."

YOU GOT A PIE CHART FOR THAT? BODILY FUNCTION DEMOGRAPHICS?

Nathan answers, "You got all this porno shit, we’re not going to touch that, farting that’s a huge chunk, poop that’s a huge chunk, hey what’s this little sliver here..."

NO ONE'S COVERING THE EIGHTEEN TO THIRTY-FIVE BARF DEMOGRAPHIC!

"And an idea is born."

"You think we’re like a bunch of artists, we’re really just genius business strategists. We just mark some numbers, name some figures."

"Per capita calculations, demographic density."

"Polls."

DEAR SIR HOW MUCH BARF WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IN A GAME?

"A LOT"

"If I show you this much barf how would you feel? Now if I show you THIS much barf how would you feel?"

"Nerds like us like jokes about barf so... That’s the way it goes."

And so comes the end of our Nerdventure. I returned their batteries and skipped along my merry way (well okay, it wasn't that merry, damn streetcar driver wouldn't let me use my damn transfer). And I think we learned a lot today, about games, about community, about initiative, and about barfing into people's mouths. Critter Crunch will be out on the PS3 later this year, Might and Magic Clash of Heroes for the DS around the same time.

For more info visit, www.capybaragames.com

For barf, get crunk B)