From Disney to indie: The birth of Trinket Studios

The trio's time at Wideload started out fine. They had each ascended to an echelon of game making that was largely occupied by wiser and more experienced developers. They were working with a knowledgeable group of veterans and a few other newbies, almost all of whom they came to enjoy and appreciate. They had each gained experience with the studio before coming on full time. Plus, the gig paid pretty well. They were nervous, sure, but they were excited. And things started off great.

But before they could get situated as full-timers, Wideload was sold to Disney Interactive Studios, which had signed on to publish Guilty Party at the time. Disney as a whole was coming off the acquisition of Marvel, and in purchasing Wideload, it bought a company which it publicly deemed one of the "premier small creative game development studios in the world." In a press release announcing the purchase, Disney officially said that Wideload would continue to focus on creating new IP, especially ones that catered to broad audiences. In the process, Seropian left his post to become Disney Interactive's new vice president of creative.

"To a degree, I don't think it was entirely about Wideload," Eastman says about the acquisition. "Disney Interactive was aware that it was floundering, and it saw Alex Seropian as a man with a plan. Alex had been vocal about the industry's business models, crunch and bad games, which were all things that Disney wanted to address. And Guilty Party was a pretty natural fit for Disney. So it made sense all around, I think."

And even though Wideload would have to report to a new corporate hierarchy all the way across the country, Eastman, Huang, Perez and others still felt a tinge of excitement about working with a brand as vaunted as Disney's. "When I was little, classmates, friends and family would often say, 'you could work at Disney in the future!'" recalls Huang. "It was a really incredible moment to realize who I'd be working for, even if it wasn't the animated film department."

The standard publisher/developer quibbles would occur every now and then, but for a while, Eastman says there was a honeymoon period during which the people of Wideload felt that Disney valued them for their creative pedigree — even if some of their past games only performed modestly. The purchase even hit something of a high note when Guilty Party launched on Wii in the summer of 2010, earning rave reviews in the process. This Disney-owned Wideload wasn't exactly what Eastman, Huang and Perez signed up for, but maybe it could work after all.

At first, Guilty Party's critical success would mask just how deeply Wideload was being affected by Disney's larger-scale issues. Some of Disney's higher-profile games were underperforming at the time, which led to a series of budget cuts and corporate restructuring. One of its biggest issues was that it didn't quite know what to do with Wideload. Wideload would pitch and get started on a number of game ideas, but for several months it'd be subject to multiple project cancellations due to how frequently Disney changed its design and business directions.

The result was a stop-and-go cycle that led Wideload to pour its brains into new games, only to have them abruptly burned from on high. This left the studio in an oddly paralyzed position after Guilty Party shipped, and each passing blow left its staffers — including Eastman, Huang and Perez — in an increasingly demoralized state. In all, Perez estimates that two or three major endeavors were shelved as a result of Disney's corporate turmoil, with four to six "smaller ideas that gained traction in the brainstorming phase" falling by the wayside as well.

Cancellations are commonplace in game development, but the frequency with which these happened combined with the memories of how open and collaborative Wideload felt before the Disney acquisition were perhaps the biggest motivating factors for Eastman, Perez and Huang to make their big move. As programmers, Eastman and Perez felt the sting of wasted time in particular.

"I think the [cancelled project] I remember most was a title we worked on that was slated to be a new family game with a Disney IP and seemed accomplishable and sort of in line with our strengths at the studio," recalls Perez. "I think on a personal level it was just a little defeating because I remember it coming to a close on the Friday before a December holiday break, and I had just gotten some interesting split-screen stuff working with a colleague.

"And then, with practically no one else in the office on the day before vacation, I learned that we were going to stop working on this project. In some ways I think the lesson was one that I needed to learn, and I wouldn't put anyone else at fault. It was an issue of me becoming too heavily invested in something before it had even left the prototype phase. Even now that's something I try to be wary of even when it's just something Tom, Eric and I are working on. But at the time it felt like I was working really hard for no reason."

Beyond that feeling of being stuck in second gear, Wideload also had to deal with an ever-decreasing sense of control over what Disney would and would not allow it to use in its titles. The studio had catered to Disney's wishes before with Guilty Party — Eastman recalls how it was transformed from a more mature murder mystery game where people got murdered in cold blood to a "Pixar-style family-friendly game where people got 'bonked'" — but once it was acquired, the team didn't have much wiggle room to do anything besides what its new owners wanted.

Again, Disney using Disney characters in its games was expected and understandable, but it was a particularly tough shift for Eastman and company, who were initially excited to be working for a studio with its roots in switching between genres and creating new things. "There was certainly a lot of 'Disneyfication' under certain regimes," Eastman remembers.

"Shortly after being acquired we put together a really fun Kinect prototype. At the greenlight meetings, [the executives] loved it and said we'd 'found the fun' faster than any of their other projects, so of course they wanted to throw out the story and wrapper we had and replace it with Disney properties." That prototype was later shelved after Disney told Wideload it had to crunch and turn the game around in time for Kinect's launch for it to have any chance.

"That removal of creative control was really clear and one of the biggest motivators for us to leave," Eastman continues. "Most games don't become better or more fun because there are Disney bears or princesses in them. For folks at Wideload, after being so dedicated to new IP, it was a real strain.

"Disney has a ton of great IP and I do think they should be using it in games. I'd just rather not be making those games."

And even though Huang thought the opportunity to work with the Disney properties and art style was great, he knew that it wouldn't let him do his most inventive work by default. "I'd frequently look at Disney artwork for inspiration when working on Guilty Party and would have a little ache inside knowing that I wouldn't ever be collaborating with the incredible art team within Disney," he says. "Even when we pulled directly from Disney's IP, it didn't mean I'd be working with other Disney artists, just handling their creations secondhand."

Eventually, Disney would merge Wideload's Shorts and Pants teams back together and settle on a relatively definitive direction for the studio: mobile. The plan was to have Wideload create 'console-quality' productions on smartphones, leveraging Disney's bankable IP while still taking advantage of a mobile pricing structure that benefited from in-app purchases. This led to Wideload finally getting started on a new title: Avengers Initiative, a gesture-based brawler for iOS and Android that featured The Incredible Hulk.

But the transition brought its share of problems for all parties involved. The morale at Wideload was already on the decline, and moving from a team that built console and PC games to one that built mobile games wasn't something that could be done overnight. Disney was still finding its footing in the mobile space, so it applied a console-style development timeline to Initiative, despite the market's emphasis on agility and frequent game updates.

This led to, in Eastman's eyes, unnecessarily dense oversight from Disney and Marvel, elongated approval cycles for the game's art direction and setup, and a lengthy marketing period that delayed the launch of the game even when it was finished. That last point was especially brutal for morale, according to Eastman, as it caused the game to miss a potentially lucrative tie-in opportunity with "The Avengers" movie, which had launched just months earlier.

Complicating all of that for Eastman, Perez and Huang was Initiative itself, which was dubbed "Infinity Hulk" internally. "We're proud of what we achieved with Avengers Initiative, but it's very clearly an Infinity Blade clone with Marvel characters," Eastman explains. "That was always tough to swallow and not the position we ever wanted to be in."

Despite all that, Eastman, Huang and Perez say they harbor no ill feelings toward Wideload today. They say that they're better game makers with a better understanding of the industry because of their time there. They all profess their love and admiration for their former co-workers, and they all understand that much of what disheartened them arose from factors out of their control. As Eastman puts it, "The corporate turmoil at Disney Interactive caused a lot of waves that a small rowboat of a studio like Wideload needed a lot more time to navigate." Yet the three are still thankful, and they're undoubtedly glad that they did what they did.

But the issues that sprung during Initiative's development confirmed that Wideload was not the place for them anymore. Huang quit when the artists' work on the game was done — on the same day as some other co-workers who would go on to become the Ray's the Dead team, Ragtag Studio and the Organ Trail developer The Men Who Wear Many Hats. Eastman would leave a few weeks later, along with some others, and Perez would follow suit after that.

Wideload still exists under Disney today, but it hasn't launched or announced any new games since Initiative was released. It pushed out a Captain America-themed DLC for that game after all those developers left, but it hasn't launched or announced anything else since. Eastman speculates that the success of Disney Infinity may affect the future direction of studios like Wideload, but for now, things have been quiet.

And in the wake of its exodus came Trinket.

Eastman and company are hoping that contentment will carry on, but they'll need their next game to be a success for it to happen. To help with that, they're turning to an unusual source of inspiration and a different way of doing business.

Trinket's next game is called Battle Chef Brigade. It's still fairly early in its development cycle, but the team describes its core concept in three words: fantasy Iron Chef — as in the cooking competition show that airs on the Food Network. Yes, for their third act, Trinket is turning to the kitchen. For a group of indies who recently got into cooking in part to save cash, it makes sense.

Battle Chef Brigade won't be a cooking sim, or a series of minigames a la Cooking Mama. Instead, Trinket wants to keep the atmosphere light and goofy — as it is in Color Sheep and Orion's Forge — by taking the cooking competition concept and coating it with a fantasy RPG glaze. As it stands now, Battle Chef Brigade is the largest project Trinket has undertaken. There's a reason for that — it's abandoning the mobile market it exclusively targeted with Color Sheep and Orion's Forge, since Eastman believes "mobile is all about free-to-play, and [we] just can't become enthusiastic about changing game design to encourage monetization." The trio is targeting Steam instead, and it's putting its livelihood on the line by going all-in on the new idea.

Eastman says the fantasy cooking game concept arose naturally from one of the brainstorming sessions he, Perez and Huang spent out by Lake Michigan and the parks in downtown Chicago. "We all came back from a morning brainstorm session by the lake, mentally exhausted and ready to eat lunch," he recalls. "And we said, 'Let's just make a cooking game.' Somehow, we all were into it."

Just before they decided on it as a group, Huang says he remembers mulling over the same idea. "I know I had been thinking 'what about a game all about food,' but I hadn't formed any solid concepts yet," he notes. "And totally separately, Tom mentioned 'cooking game.' I got all excited that we were on the same wave length."

It wasn't the first time Huang has felt that creative connection with Eastman, or with Perez, for that matter. And judging by what the three of them have done together thus far, it probably won't be the last.