Image & Form details how they came up with SteamWorld Heist

A portion of a TouchArcade interview with Image & Form's Brjann Sigurgeirsson...

TA: How did the idea of doing a turn-based strategy RPG from a side-view come about? It's a rather unusual approach to the genre. Any specific inspirations for the game?

BS: All our game ideas are usually conceived during lunch breaks. That's when many of us come together and talk about stuff. I should feel guilty about this since everyone's by definition not at work while having lunch, but we don't always toss around game ideas; a lot of lunch hour discussions revolve around politics, pop culture and what have you. But yes, that's where they're most often "born". What we do then is just throw the ideas around without any real effort - it's not like we're trying to come up with new games, it's just a relaxed forum for discussion.

As you've probably noticed, our games aren't just different from each other in genre; they're genre mashups, which makes them interesting on a quite other level as well. We try to not just nail core gameplay mechanisms, but also strive to make our games a bit more than one-trick ponies. Anthill is a line-drawing real-time strategy castle-defense game, SteamWorld Dig is a mining platformer, and SteamWorld Heist is a turn-based combat strategy shooter.

When an idea "sticks" we draft a game design document. It's very rough at the outset. Then our artists discuss what it should look like, while our programmers and designers talk about what needs to be done. When in development we often run in the wrong direction, because typically our games haven't really been done before. We experiment, backtrack and try new things if stuff doesn't work. Very much of the game comes together at the end!

I know for a fact that our creative lead Olle Håkansson and a few others were totally engrossed in XCOM around the time of the "birth" of SteamWorld Heist, and that's also how it started. He was praising that game during lunch one day, and then someone said "Wouldn't it be cool if...", which is how everything typically starts here. We could also study the side-view perspective of Worms, although no one was enamored with that game the way Olle and the others were with XCOM.
Personally I was more than happy. I love strategy games. I play at least ten online chess games per day, and strategy games is what I get hooked on. It's like crack, I imagine. I forget everything else and don't want to do ANYTHING else when I play.