Former Tomb Raider developers found Lady Shotgun Games

Wanting more creative control over their own projects, a couple of former Eidos staffers have dived into the iOS business.

Big projects and big companies obviously have lots of people involved and lots of hoops to jump through to get a game to release," co-founder Anna Marsh told Gamasutra.

"It's great to be able to do something that little bit more organically, more freely, where we can put together a game that we simply think is a just lots of fun to play without trying to please all of the people all of the time."

March has credits on the Tomb Raider and Hitman franchises, and has worked at Psygnosis, Sony, Sega, Eidos and Crystal Dynamics.

Her co-founder, Sarah van Rompaey, is another Tomb Raider veteran, with a CV spanning Infogrames, Atari, Eidos and Sony.

The rest of the fledgling indie's staff are freelancers, and an unusually large proportion are female - something of a break from the male dominance present in the industry.

"I think one of the main things that has made us so female-orientated is our totally flexible work ethic. Both myself and Sarah found ourselves taking a career break to look after our children at around the same time and discussing about how a 'different kind of developer' could work, one where everyone could work the flexible hours they chose," Marsh explained.

"We felt that the necessity to have a whole team in a physical office location working long hours was usually born of an insufficient pre-production period and overly tight scheduling."

Lady Shotgun Games expects to reveal its first title over the next few months, for launch later this year. Although little is known of the iOS title, the developer plans to bring it to other platforms if possible.

"We're binding it together with a great tongue in cheek narrative that makes me laugh every time I read it - I adore that you can get away with humour in casual titles," Marsh said.

"And I can say that we all have a bit of a penchant for 80's cheesy movies."