COFA Games is a game development company from Serbia, currently working on a pretty ambitious project for an indie studio, called Awakening of Heroes. This is an unusual multi-player game that combines elements of team fight, strategy, arcade, town development and pre-game unions. Although still in the Alpha phase, Awakening of Heroes has appeared on Steam Greenlight waiting for your thumbs up to help it enter this huge PC game download store.
COFA Games’ CEO Nikola Mitic shares the story of their game taking place in a dreamlike city, and featuring a sweet old lady obsessed with extreme sports such as tombola and knitting, a mellow-heart butcher with an alter-ego of a math genius, a sexy chimney sweeper with a vendetta against Santa, a hipster in an atypical bad mood, and a grandpa daredevil. And of course the craziest superpowers one can come up with.
Choosing Young But Exceptional Talents
At the beginning, there were two men, Nikola and Zoran, both with the same passion for gaming and the idea to make a serious multiplayer game. It happened that Nikola was capable to form a team. Well, a small team, but still a team of talented young developers. It also happened that Zoran knew how to recruit and fit them into a ‘team coding’ system. Besides, he knew how to share his experience, which was a great help for Dusan and Branko, who were at the beginning of their developer careers. Today, after slightly more than a year that we have been working on this project, they are serious programmers whose knowledge is implemented in almost every aspect of the game. Their progress is significant partly because of their talent and great academic knowledge, and partly because of their enthusiasm and great commitment, and finally on the ground that they were and still are well organized.
Today, our team has 10 members. From this perspective, recruiting passionate young developers seems like a right decision. Of course, to make sure that you will not waste their potential, you need to point them in the right direction and keep the team focused on priorities. But before all these steps, you need to decide what you really want to create.
How We Adapted MOBA For The Mid-core Gamers
After series of brainstormings, we decided to create a MOBA game, although we were completely aware of the fact that competing with giants from the genre was a mission impossible. That is why we needed a different approach, which basically meant: “Let’s use the basic MOBA concept (an arena, two teams fighting online with the main goal to destroy the enemy’s bases…) to develop something essentially new; let’s change things we do not like so much in other MOBAs”. These things are mostly related to a difficult learning process, lengthy matches and pretty cruel society which, as we believe, causes high resentment among the so called mid-core gamers. Thus, we are focused on making a fast-paced game whose features can be learned promptly, as well as a game that should have a relaxing, rather than highly competitive feel.
We also needed an original story and design. No more monsters, dragons, mythical creatures… Instead, we chose casual people who awakened heroes within all of a sudden, to be the main protagonist in Awakening of Heroes.
Luckily, we found an exquisite young concept artist Goran who was highly interested in participating in the game development. Thanks to him, our heroes got that funny, cartoonish look, and a lot of cool, artistic details. The arena (city streets) is designed in a way that brings an interesting retrofuturistic look. We believe that these design elements make a nice distinction compared to other games.
Several original features were incorporated in Awakening of Heroes during its development, after we had estimated that they could bring the game closer to mid-core players. Firstly, before entering the arena, each gamer will have an option of making his/her own city which will have influence on characteristics of a hero he or she uses in the battle.
Furthermore, we wanted to infuse a slight dose of unpredictability into a battle, so we implemented power ups - special weapons which players collect randomly in the arena. Finally, we are working on a special in-game shop, in which players will choose among dozens of crazy plants which will later be used in a combat as an important element of strategy. And speaking about monetization, we chose the freemium business model, so the game will be free-to-play.
Technical Aspects - Is This Too Ambitious For An Indie Studio?
For a small studio that makes a complex game, time is always a scarce resource. That is why we decided to use Unity 3D, instead of making our own engine. That allows us to focus on creative aspects of the game development rather than on solving technical problems. However, developers always have to be prepared for some imperfections which come with purchased engines, causing a slowdown of the development process. Anyway, we gave Unity 3D a chance before some more renowned engines, as we believed in its fast growth and potential. From this perspective, it seems that we made a right decision.
One of the biggest technical problems that we are working on is related to hardware requirements on different platforms. When comparing different aspects of programming (3D modeling, physics, animation system, particle system and multiplayer), the last one happens to be the most demanding, especially when it comes to synchronizations on different platforms.
The special method of coding that involves two or more developers working on the same code is something that we can highly recommend. Not only that this method ensures the higher code quality and bug reduction, but also it provides that the entire knowledge stays within the team.
Finally, we always try to be innovative, seeing that as an opportunity to single out Awakening of Heroes from the competition. But that was not the only reason why we integrated the game with Oculus Rift. We really wanted to see the virtual reality of our game, as well as to give our fans this outstanding opportunity. But first, we needed to acquire some fans, which is always a very hard task for an indie game studio.
How People Found Out About Us?
We are aware of the fact that having a great game does not necessarily mean that we are going to reach any success in prospect. If you have money, it is always easy to bring the attention to the game. In our case, there was not a lot of mystery. We needed to promote the game while spending as little as possible.
Having acquired the initial base of fans on social networks, we went on with promotion by sharing photos, screenshots and videos. Besides, we organized several interesting competitions, asking our fans to share there ideas about next Awakening of Heroes characters. We had a great response and consequently, the number of fans has grown rapidly. Beside the fact that we improved relationships with fans, we got numerous interesting ideas which helped us understand their expectations better.
Now, with the game in the Alpha phase, we are trying to build special relationships with our testers (we have around 4.000 Alpha subscribers) in order to ensure an adequate response. For that purpose, we made a closed Facebook group of testers, as well as a forum which serves for serious elaborations.
At the same time, we applied to several programs for startups, and achieved significant success. We got the grant from EU Innovative Fund as one of the most innovative enterprises in Serbia. Besides, COFA Games was selected to participate in the Startup Sauna Accelerator. While being on the program in Finland, we took part in several renowned events and entered the final of the Midnight Pitch Fest. Finally, we got chosen to be a part of the Catalyst startup program. These are things that make us believe in our project even stronger. Finally, at Casual Connect Eastern Europe 2014 Indie Prize contest, Awakening of Heroes was chosen the “Best in Show” among 40 indie developers.
Once it gets greenlit, Awakening of Heroes will be free to play on Steam. Along with the “standalone” version, it will be playable on mobile devices and currently it’s also available to Alpha testers on Facebook.
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