ContributionsPostmortem

Indie Showcase: Ostrich Banditos’ Westerado

January 30, 2013 — by Mariia Lototska

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ContributionsPostmortem

Indie Showcase: Ostrich Banditos’ Westerado

January 30, 2013 — by Mariia Lototska

About five months ago Ostrich Banditos, a small independent Dutch games studio, came into existence. Ostrich Banditos counts five guys, all students, who decided to collaborate in an effort to create lively, memorable games. This is the story of developing Westerado, a western action adventure detective RPG for Adult Swim, or simpler: spaghetti western simulator.

Ostrich Banditos
The five Banditos, from left to right: Jeroen Wimmers (programmer), John Gottschalk (business dude and game designer), Jordi Boin (game artist), Wytze Kamp (producer and game designer) and Yhorik Aarsen (programmer and interaction/game designer).

Before the summer three of us, John Gottschalk, Jordi Boin and Jeroen Wimmers collaborated on a school project. The goal: to create a rogue-like game, heavily inspired by Western movies. For a couple of months we worked on the game and delivered an immersive yet barebones game where the player could walk around and shoot bandits.

In the following weeks the full team came together to discuss the setup of Ostrich Banditos. After some talking Octrich Banditos was born! Now we were scouting for assignments. The most interesting one was suggested to us by the guys at Vlambeer: Adult Swim was looking for developers to pitch their game ideas. We collected a few ideas we already had, from which Westerado stood out. The game ready to show and we could make a quick and easy start on expanding the game.




In order to see what Adult Swim was looking for in a game we took a look at their previous titles. Each of their games has some sort of weird twist, something odd that would make the game stand out. Westerado, in its current form, lacked focus and structure. This led us to re-defining the experience: we’d have to give our western game more focus and integrate Adult Swim’s twist.

Mariia Lototska

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