I recently got my first smart phone and I've been enjoying it immensely.  Being able to check anything, at any time, from anywhere is a freedom that the western world takes for granted. But one thing I really wanted to check out was the gaming scene. I've heard a few great titles, the insanely popular Angry Birds and the undeniably fun Infinity Blade, but what about other games?

Not wanting to be short-changed, which is almost impossible on such a cheap platform, I was suggested Train Conductor 2 by Convict Interactive's Rebecca Fernandez. The game was developed by Australian company, The Voxel Agents. While I had only heard about the team in passing I recently interviewed them about their game and how they are going as a best-selling game developer.

QJ:  Just to equate our readers, who are the Voxel Agents and how long have you been working in the games industry?

VA: The Voxel Agents were formed as a team in early 2009, and we've been making hit iOS games since then. The original team all studied together at University, so we've known each other for years and working together as an indie team has been a long term ambition for us. We're stoked that we're now a successful company who can keep doing what we love.

I was never part of the more traditional "studio" model of development that dominated the game industry for so long. Prior to The Voxel Agents, I wasn't in a games company per se but was creating transmedia projects that had significant game components. I've also been making games since I was about 8 or 10 years old in BASIC on the old family computer, so it's hard to quantify exactly when I became an indie dev. It's just in my blood really.

QJ: With such a strong series of games, how big is the team at Voxel Agents and who are they?

VA: The original team consisted of Agent Matt Clark (formerly of Pandemic Studios), Agent Simon Joslin (formerly a designer at Half Brick), and myself, Agent Tom Killen. We've since been joined by Agent's Henrik Pettersson and Yangtian Li. 

Henrik is highly talented designer. We knew we had to team up with Henrik when he beat us at a 48 hour Game Jam (The game can be seen and played here), and so he joined us in late 2010. Yangtian - also known as Agent Tian - is an absolutely amazing artist. Her work has been featured at the National Gallery of Victoria. Her painterly art style and talent is an enormous addition to the team. She joined us in early 2011.

 
The latest addition to the team is Agent Sam Wong. In many ways Sam has been with us from the start. He is a young programmer with a passion for games that we noticed when we first started the studio. Now that Sam has finished studying games at university, he's joined our team as a welcome addition to our engineering skillset.

QJ: To get back to talking about your games, where did the inspiration for Train Conductor come from?

VA: Our first studio space was a tiny room that quickly ran out of air and became stifling hot due to three developers being crammed into a space that would have better served as a storage closet. To escape from this we would often conduct our meetings outside of the studio, and one of our favourite locations was near the river at Flinders St station. As we were looking out over the river, Agent Matt noticed the patterns in which the trains arrived and departed and had the germ of the idea. We quickly prototyped that idea and iterated upon it until very soon we found that we had a fun game to play.

Our creative process works in a very iterative fashion. It's rare that someone has a brilliant idea that just works. More frequently someone has a germ of an idea that is teased out through rapid prototyping. At each iteration of a prototype, we assess what worked and what didn't, and thus improve the prototype in future iterations.

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