iPad Gold Award-winner Incoboto was nearly canned admits Carter

Pocket Gamer Gold Award-winning iPad hit Incoboto almost never saw the light of day, development veteran Dene Carter has admitted.

Speaking in an interview with Pocket Gamer during GDC 2012, the ex-Lionhead member confessed that at one stage he decided to scrap the game.

"I actually deleted the game from my project files about two thirds of the way through," Carter told PG. "I completely lost faith that it had any merit in it.

"My physics had another bug in it. I'm rubbish. It's just not gelling. It's not really coming together, I'm not sure the atmosphere is pervasive enough, it's not depressing enough, dammit. I'm just barking up the wrong tree," he sighed.

With a track record stretching back to Druid on the Commodore 64 in 1987, Carter decided he'd rather "write a shoot-'em-up for myself," but his wife intervened and insisted on allowing her to play it.

"She got me to take it out of the trash," he said. "I made a build for her and let her play it for about half an hour, and she said, 'It's really good - you just need to finish it.' My wife is very, very harsh, and it was exactly what I needed."

Even then, the former Big Blue Box founder found that procrastination firmly set in. "I've got the music playing, I've got a glass of wine, and the candles are out, I've made a lovely working environment.

"You know what? I just won't engage with the making of a level," Carter recalled. "Oh, dear lord. It was terrible. There were weeks where I sat there doing nothing. It was horrible. It was one of the hardest experiences I've had in a very, very long career."

Fortunately, he battled on and "managed to put it together as a cohesive whole" and scored a string of positive reviews for his efforts, including Matt Wales's 9/10 review.