Infinity Blade studio Chair is teaming up with Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams’ (pictured right) Bad Robot studio. The collaboration’s first project, Spyjinx, will be out on PC and mobile devices next year.
Spyjinx is described as an action-strategy game with an espionage theme. In an interview conducted by Geoff Keighley, Abrams explains his reasons for the partnership.
“I’m such a fan of what Chair has made and the things that they’ve allowed me and my kids to play,” Abrams says. “I remember the first time I played Infinity Blade, and it blew my mind what you guys had done with Unreal Engine on that device. I feel like its a natural progression from what we’ve been doing. We really wanted to expand into this area of entertainment.”
Given Abrams’ other responsibilities and the studio’s ongoing work on a number of projects, Chair and Bad Robot spend a lot of time collaborating remotely. Chair co-founder Donald Mustard (pictured left) explains how they’ve refined their partnership.
“One of the first things we said was we need to do lots of video conferencing,” he explains. “We were sharing code back and forth across the network. Now its to the point where I check in a file into the game, people here working on music or the sound or something else, they’re instantly getting that checked in and working on the stuff they’re doing and putting it back in the game. We’ve got this super integrated flow.”
Spyjinx will be in public beta before it’s released. You can sign up to take part on the official website.