Nuked Cockroach is an indie game studio based in a small country in North Africa: Tunisia, where the video game development industry is not a thing. They decided to start their own project and try to compete with international indie studios. The team started very small with only one programmer, one 3D artist and one concept artist, and it started expanding along with project vision, to eventually reach a total of 15 members: developers and management included. They share the story of their creation, a multiplayer shooter called Veterans Online.
Veterans Online is…
To introduce the game quickly before going in details: Veterans Online is an online top-down shooter, multiplayer, and it’s free-to-play. The game was posted on Steam Greenlight and the community voted for it to be out there in only eight days. It reached top 30 in two days. This was the most important milestone for us as a team, and it made us work harder to share the game with the public as soon as possible.
The game is team-based: you fight together with your team members for different objectives depending on the map you are playing in. Each different map has a unique style and objectives: deathmatch, object captures, domination etc. This variety will offer the player a collection of distinctive experiences that we focused on elaborating while designing each of the maps.
If we like it, they will love it!
The game was born during an experiment on top-down shooters done by the oldest developers. But it turned out interesting, so they kept developing it. It even became a way of entertainment for the team during the night. This was the turning point: they saw an opportunity and grabbed it. If the developers of the game – who are veteran gamers themselves – loved it, why not offer it to the public?
Before making Veterans Online the main project, we made a sort of an alpha version and shared it with friends and old fellow gamers. The positive feedback we received made our decision easier and the opportunity clearer.
Mind the Playstyles
We started working on the game late in 2015, pushing the development and features a bit more every time, and trying to increase the overall game quality. We started with basic features like a variety of weapons and movement styles. Then we moved on to improving each, and that led to the creation of other features: for example, we did not think about implementing the stamina system in the game, until we worked on the player “roll”: we thought that players might abuse this as a speed movement, so we started working on the stamina.
We tried to develop a game that takes the players away from the traditional top-down shooters to a more up-to-date playstyle. With the use of twin-sticks - or keyboard - to control a fast-paced game. We implemented multiple features to cater to individual playstyles: from the variety of weapons (ranging from precision to chaotic ones), multitude of grenades, to traps for the players that love hunting while hiding in a bush. And even things enjoyed by hardcore players, like headshots or ricochet bullets.
The First studio of the country
One of the biggest challenges we are facing now is the fact that we are the first indie studio in our country. This made the marketing of our game and the building of community harder than we thought. Yes, we believe in the quality of our game and its potential, but delivering the right message to the huge community was not given. Our local ecosystem is not supportive for this type of industry and that pushed us to work with international agencies, which usually eats a big chunk of our budget.
“We believe that we’ll be able to enter the beta phase and show our creation by the end of September 2016: it will be a closed beta where only people who subscribed via our website will be able to play”, the developers say. The subscription is still open, so you can still be one of the early players: just submit your email at the game’s website. The team will then collect feedback and suggestions from these early adopters, and hopes to launch in October 2016.
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