Tight team

Ascendant’s in-house team is just 14 people strong, a far cry from the hundreds of people who made Epic Mickey 2, Spector’s most recent game. “When Paul and I talked about Otherside in the early days, we both looked at each other and said, ‘Oh my god, I never want to work in a 200-person team again’,” he says. He describes Otherside’s scale as “indie-plusplus”, a size with which he’s familiar from the good old days. “Our games have always been smaller in terms of world, but deeper than a lot of others, which go miles wide but their simulation is really an inch deep. We go the opposite, an inch wide and a mile deep. What that means is that we have to create less content, but have to build more robust systems.”