Tell us a little bit about yourself/company/team?
ApathyWorks is me, Alex “AlejandroDaJ” Jordan, a 27 year old who lives in Washington, DC and works for the U.S. Department of Labor. I started programming and doing level design in elementary school, graduated to modding, and eventually hit the ground running with indie game design with XNA in early 2009. Cute Things Dying Violently will be my second title for Xbox Live Indie Games.

While I certainly enjoy helping out workers and the unemployed at the Labor Department, my real passion lies with game design and writing, and some day I hope to do it for a living. Although it’s currently just a hobby of mine, the “apathy” in my studio title is a complete misnomer that hides my desire to create worlds and experiences and to share them with others.

What made you decide to use the XBLIG platform for your game?
I already owned an Xbox 360, and developing a game for a console had always been a dream of mine. When XNA was announced, I couldn’t believe it, no company had ever made it that easy to get your game on their console. I jumped at the opportunity and spent a good chunk of 2009 learning C# and XNA. That means I’ve been developing for XBLIG for two and a half years now.

What was the biggest hurdle in getting this game finished?
The particle system. I wanted the game to live up to its title, so it was important that I could get as much blood and destruction on screen as players would reasonably expect. While some of the bloodier moments ran fine on my development computer, the 360 would choke on, say, 20 simultaneous explosions or eight simultaneous deaths-by-buzzsaw. I actually spent three months going through the particle code over and over again until I found the root of the slowdown. The exasperating thing is that three months of headaches were resolved with 30 minutes of programming.

Do you have plans to continue developing games for the Xbox 360?
Yes, but only with multi-platform titles. The response to Cute Things Dying Violently has been enormous and overwhelmingly positive, especially among the players themselves, so I’m going to keep supporting it post-release with lots of new content updates, balancing, and the usual assortment of bug fixes. Then I think it’ll be fun to do a sequel on the 360, because people seem to really like the concept and I had to leave a metric ton of cool ideas on the cutting room floor. But after that, I’m going to have to start targeting other markets, because Xbox Live Indie Games is too low-volume to earn much revenue. But I really do hope I can go multi-platform and keep supporting XBLIG with future titles.

How does it feel to know that your game was chosen by your peers and community?
It was thrilling and incredibly gratifying. The voting process made me start holding my breath for unhealthy amounts of time, but getting into the Uprising itself felt fantastic. And that wasn’t even the best part… the coolest aspect has been collaborating and trading advice with my fellow developers and with the Uprising organizers. I’ve gotten to know a lot of talented folks that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have really interacted with.

What games directly influenced your game, both positive (wanted to mimic) and negative (things you didn’t wants players going through or feeling)?
Okay, here’s the funny thing. You know what game I was mostly worried about being too similar to? World of Goo. I spent quite a bit of time praying that people wouldn’t think I made a Goo ripoff, especially with the “get the cute thing to the exit” similarity. Which is funny, because nobody ever mentions World of Goo in reviews, they always mention Angry Birds, Super Meat Boy, and Lemmings. In fact, I think my game has been officially nicknamed Angry Meat Lemmings.

When I drew up the design document in early 2010, I’d never played Lemmings in my youth and I’d never heard of Super Meat Boy or Angry Birds (I didn’t own an iPhone until December 2010). As development wore on and people brought these games to my attention, I worried about what they had in common with CTDV. But in the end, I think people see CTDV as a game that stands on its own, and I mostly think the shared attributes with each of the other three games are positive overall.

Did I copy any of those popular game mechanics on purpose? No. Did I have any of them beamed into my brain in the moments when I foolishly removed my tinfoil hat? No comment.

How did you get into making games?
I started programming in QBasic in elementary school after my dad gave me a book on it that he had lying around. From there, I graduated to making levels for Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Half-Life 1. Eventually, I got reasonably good at making levels for HL1 and fell in with the Firearms HL mod community. Modding was all the rage back then, thanks to Counter-Strike, so I kept at it and eventually joined the Firearms Team. Once Half-Life 2 came out, I got exposure to other aspects of game design beyond level-making, like 3D modeling, animating, and using Photoshop. By the time I struck out on my own with Xbox Live Indie Games, I’d picked up a ton of knowledge on how to make a game from scratch.

Do you feel your final product fully reflects the vision you had in your head?
Gameplay-wise, yes. I jettisoned most of the poorly thought-out gameplay mechanics early on in the development process, so the majority of the time was spent tweaking and adjusting existing ideas rather than pulling things out of my ass. The only major things that appeared late in the development process were the ideas for boss fights with the Hate Bot and the special challenge levels. Aside from that, it plays almost exactly like how I imagined it would.

As for how it looks? I initially wanted to go with a pencil-and-watercolor approach, as I wanted to embrace the Disney-ish artwork style of Curse of Monkey Island, which is one of the best games in the known universe. However, I’m nothing more than an avid notebook doodler, so my nascent Photoshop skills weren’t up to the task. I eventually bought myself a Wacom Bamboo and managed to improve my skills to the point where I could bang out simple three-tone art, which I finalized only weeks before my release date. I’m going to spend the next few months refining my art style until it gets as lush and expressive as I want it to be. Or maybe I’ll just fail miserably, we’ll see!