Easily the most common question we've had is why we made the decision to switch from Android to the Xbox. It's not totally cut-and-dry, and it doesn't mean that there's no Android for us in the future. And it wasn't the only big change. I'll try to walk you through what happened.

Genre

First, we came to the realization that an RPG was just too big of a commitment for a small team. In order to have a successful, memorable RPG we figured we would need a lot of art, sound, and writing. When we started mapping out the requirements for the game, we realized that the shear amount of content was beyond us at this point. So at least in regards to the genre, we needed to downscale.

That led us to the idea of doing a game where the genre wasn't quite as demanding for content creation. Where we could re-use a lot of the same assets without feeling bad about it, and where the story would be simple enough so that we wouldn't have to do extra work to accommodate it. We also wanted to make sure we could still do it in 2D. All of those considerations pointed us straight at making a tower defense game.

Art

We made some preliminary art ourselves, but we knew that we wanted it to have a more professional, stylized look to it. So we decided to outsource it, and started working on finding an artist. This also made us realize that if we were going to all this trouble about the art, we might as well make the game in full 1080p first, and then downscale to a final display resolution.

Platform

Re-examining our requirements, we came up with a list for an ideal target platform that looked something like this:

• supports HD
• easily accessible by a lot of people
• something we ourselves would be willing (and able) to play on - that is, devices we already own
• easy to spend money on

Both the Xbox 360 and Android fit the last two, but the Xbox easily had the upper hand on the first two: a much higher maximum resolution (1080p vs. HVGA) and a much larger install base (30 million vs. 3 million).

In the end, we view this more as a vote for the Xbox than a vote against Android. With the huge added bonus we haven't mentioned before being that when you develop a game for the Xbox, porting it to Windows (a platform with an even larger install base) is supposed to be super easy.