Tom Hegarty and his pals at London-based indie Roll7 started writing an iOS game about skateboarding called OlliOlli, a 2D endless runner. One day, he attended a games convention, spotted a man in full skateboard gear standing around in a corridor, and showed him the game.
Turned out that guy in the skateboard gear knew Sony's Shahid Ahmad pretty well, so he made some email introductions. Two weeks later, Tom was demo-ing his game to the man in charge of signing indies to Sony's Vita development program.
"When we got the meeting, we went in there with a whole bunch of ideas," said Hegarty. "They didn't really like any of them. So we showed them OlliOlli, and they were hooked."
The game has been signed as a Vita exclusive, due for release at the end of this year, but there have been some changes along the way.
"Originally, it was all procedurally generated," said Hegarty. "But we found out that the really fun part was figuring out how to pull off a perfect series of tricks and land just right. We changed it so that players could perfect their tricks, and know what is coming up next."
He said that the game is "not easy", but that they are working on creating a smoother early game learning curve, and perhaps making it even tougher at the end.