Rollers of the Realm - Postmortem @ Gamasutra

Phantom Compass was founded back in 2008 as a service company developing branded games for kids TV producers. Our first four years were highly productive, but we couldn't grow the company on the basis of low-budget Flash games.

In late 2011, a local triple-A studio laid off dozens of staff. Many of them had years of industry experience, but few or no shipped titles and needed to build their portfolios before finding work. Phantom Compass founder, Tony Walsh and production head, Ericka Evans, saw an opportunity in this and brought some of the best industry vets into a meeting with our tiny indie team.

The triple-A side came to us with high production values and experience with shipping large titles. On the indie side, we had rapid development know-how, agility, and experience running distributed teams (Phantom Compass operates out of Toronto and nearby St. Catharines). Our mission was to bring both sides together in creating a small game for Xbox Live Indie Games — a six-month project where we could learn from each other, provide our triple-A friends with a unique portfolio piece, and shift Phantom Compass into high gear.

We took a big risk in combining two distinct teams and fittingly chose an unlikely mash-up of pinball and role-playing games. What we ended up with three years, two funding rounds, and nearly 50 extended team members later exceeded everyone's expectations. Here are the high scores and gutter balls of that adventure.