Bringing back to life game series that have been appreciated but slightly forgotten is what the Kalypso Media company does as a publisher. They’ve previously worked with Tropico, and recently teamed up with the Hungary-based Kite Games to create Sudden Strike 4, the newest installment in the fan favorite World War II real-time strategy series. Here Christian Schlütter, the game’s producer, sheds some light on the what it’s like to honor an established brand while making an initially 2D game in 3D, and going to the console platform.
“Naturally, we are aiming to revive the series with Sudden Strike 4, but it is a full-fledged and completely new entry in the series – not a remake”, Christian explains. “We are looking to Sudden Strike 1 and 2 for inspiration, and will be evolving the gameplay from that core experience.”
Lucid Labs is a small indie team based in India, formed by a group of students right after participating in a 24-hour game jam and assuming they had made the best game in the competition. Because of the community feedback and praise from their trainers, they decided to complete the game and make it available to the global market to enjoy even more appraisals. This debut game is called Roto. Chirag Chopra, the founder of Lucid Labs, shares the story of the game about big balls.
Chirag Chopra also presented at Casual Connect Asia 2014:
An Announcement That Turned Students Into a Studio
Since we all come from a video game design college, news about various game jams come our way very often. One usual day, as we were about to go to the lectures, we saw a poster about the Global Game Development Student Competition on our notice board. We got excited: this was a 24-hour game jam on a weekend, so we could easily participate without missing any lectures or assignments. Also, it was a wonderful opportunity to hang out with global game-makers.
So, the team was formed of three members: game designer Pramod Nautiyal, programmer Sujeet Kumar, and myself as game designer and artist. I decided to name it Lucid Labs.
They were going to the lectures, but formed a studio
The rules of the game jam were simple: develop a small game/prototype on a given theme. After about three hours of brainstorming and rejecting ideas, we finally had a concept in mind. Priority was given to something casual that could be made, polished, and tested within 24 hours. And then the work began. Since the game had to be made really fast, we decided to use an engine which is easy to use, yet powerful. Sujeet suggested Construct 2, so we decided to enter the Browser category, because it was easy to make HTML5 browser games with that engine.
College Dorm: The Place for Instant Testing
One positive aspect of developing a game while living in the college dorm is that we could have some people come over to our room, make them play a specific portion of the game, and get instant feedback. This helped us make a good prototype, crafted on community feedback, and make sure we were creating something good.
Since our game was pretty simple and straightforward to play, I decided to keep it as minimalistic as possible in terms of art. I experimented with basic colors like grey and black (I love grey and black) and got good results. After hours of no sleep, playtests, and hard work, we had a good game in our hands. We decided to call it Black Sun. It wasn’t for any specific or racial reasons. It’s was just because the game had big black balls.
First name was Black Sun, because of the big black balls in the game.
It was time to submit the game, get some sleep, and hope that we’ll win. The results were announced in about three months. Unfortunately, no one won in our category of Browser Game. Nevertheless, two games, including ours, won an Honorable Mention, and we received a $1000 cash prize. We were really happy and sad at the same time: disappointed that we didn’t enter the Top 3, but happy since no other game did either. On the other hand, we were glad that the jury appreciated our creation, and it was enough to motivate us to complete the game and release it.
Another advantage of studying in a video game design college: you are always surrounded by creative people.
After deciding to work on our game further and bring it to the global market, we knew we needed more members in the team. And here goes another advantage of studying in a video game design college: you are always surrounded by creative people. We needed one artist and one level designer, and I already had perfect candidates in mind: Ankush Madad (one of the best level designers in the college) and Rahul Narayanan
(one of the best artists in the college). They were the perfect addition to the team. After explaining to them the concept and our vision, they instantly agreed to work with us. Now, Lucid Labs had five members in total. Woohoo!
Studying game design in college makes it easier to widen the team when necessary
Going Mobile, as Suggested After the Game Jam
Production began instantly after we set up the team and made sure everyone was on the same path. One common feedback we got after the game jam was to port our game to touch mobile devices. We knew we had to do this, and it was easy, since our game had a very simple tap control scheme. But going mobile meant that we had to switch from Construct 2 to some powerful engine for mobile devices. Sujeet recommended Corona SDK due to its superb performance and usability. Our programmer was comfortable with Corona, since he has prior knowledge of Lua – the language used in the SDK.
Going mobile required switching Corona SDK to a mobile engine. Sujeet recommended Corona SDK due to its superb performance and usability.
The whole game code was re-written in Lua. In about a month, we had a small prototype ready for Android devices. Just in time for GDC 2013! We decided to take the game to GDC India to showcase and meet some publishers. Everything was planned and going smoothly, but, as we discovered later - not for long.
GDC 2013 - The Big Luck and a Disappointment in Publishers
We had attended GDC India previously in 2012, but this time, it was special. Now we had a game in hand and were looking for potential investors/publishers. Those two days were spent talking to numerous people and showing them the game. Surprisingly, we managed to grab the attention of a couple of publishers, who got interested in publishing the game and investing some money into it. That was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had in all my life. A small team of students from India, who had no prior experience in the industry, managed to attract publishers for their first game! What else could we possibly ask for?
A small team of students from India, who had no prior experience in the industry, managed to attract Publishers for their first game! What else could we possibly ask for?
After coming back from one of the best GDCs ever, it was time to decide and choose the best publisher (in terms of deal offered). This was very hard. Eventually, we decided to go with one who was somewhat new in the scene, but offered a good deal. At least, that’s what we thought.
We started working on legal things and lots of other stuff. We also changed the overall theme and art of the game in order to please the publishers. But soon we decided it was a bad idea, and realized Roto plays best when accompanied by its original minimalist art style.
We understood Roto plays best with the original minimalist style
After about a month of negotiations with our preferred publisher, we decided to look for other opportunities as well. Maybe this was a bad idea, but it helped us get a broader view of how things work under a publisher. Call us immature or naïve, but we realized we were not meant to work with a publisher. Not because there were restrictions, we just didn’t like the idea of selling our own game to someone else.
Call us immature or naïve, but we realized we were not meant to work with a publisher.
We decided to drop the idea of getting our game published by other people and said a big NO to everyone. I’m sure they were really upset and angry with us, but at least we chose a path which WE wanted. We were even more excited about self-publishing.
“What the Hell is Black Sun?” Means Time for Changes
“What the hell is Black Sun?” This was the most common question people asked us when we told them about the game. The name sucked. It was obvious that we had to find a new one which could match the game and sound less racial. I have no idea how Sujeet came up with the name Roto, but we all liked it.
The development was in full production. Meanwhile, we were looking for events and awards to showcase our game and gain exposure. One such opportunity was the Indian Creative Tech Awards. We decided to give it a try and submitted the game. To our surprise, we got nominated for two categories – Excellence in Browser Gaming and Excellence in Mobile Gaming. The results are still due and we are quite positive in our expectations.
The name sucked. It was obvious that we had to find a new one which could match the game and sound less racial.
Thanks to our level designer Ankush, we created a lot of new levels for the game, making it even more viable for the global market. And Rahul helped us refine the art and make it even more polished and beautiful (yes, it is beautiful for us :P). Rahul also created a lot of visual feedback for every action in the game. This was something that the game lacked since its early prototype.
The Game Needs Sound!
All of a sudden, we realized we needed sound for the game - initially, it was completely silent! How could we publish the game without any sound? We didn’t think about this at all before. Fortunately, I have a friend who is studying sound design, and I thought he might be the best candidate for this job. I explained the game to him, as well as what kind of sound and music would suit it best. Samples started coming in. A lot of samples. But the team was somewhat not happy. Not because the sound guy was bad, mainly because his style of music didn’t match our vision of the game.
I started looking for another sound designer. A video game sound designer, to be precise. After looking almost everywhere on the social networks, I found The Perfect Guy.
The perfect sound designer for Roto - Ash Read
The guy who had worked on games like Watch Dogs and The Crew, agreed to be our sound designer – Ash Read. Un-f*cking-believable! I still have no idea how I managed to convince him to work with our game. Ash’s music is one of the most important assets in Roto. Apart from being one of the most talented sound designers ever, he’s one of the best people I’ve known in life.
Finally, we’ve released our game on Android. iOS is now the priority and we might bring it to Windows - depending on the demand. Meanwhile, the team is preparing the next update to the game, with new level packs and, possibly, a new game mode. Right now, our dream game is still Roto and we want to make it big, not only in Asia, but all over the world. We don’t want to get rich or become millionaires. If we wanted that, we would have made this a paid game. We just want to create a fan base which loves the game and is always excited for future updates. We want to tell the world that people from India can create unique and fun experiences for the world. The proof of this is already coming our way: we’ve been featured on IGN and the biggest website in China.
This is a guest post from Jheng Wei Ciao, founder of Monkey Potion, on his experience as an Indie Prize showcase participant at Casual Connect Asia.
We are Monkey Potion, an independent game studio based in Taiwan. This was our first time attending Casual Connect and Indie Showcase. It was a great pleasure having the opportunity to introduce our game to overseas players and game publishers. It was also an awesome experience to communicate with so many indie developers who came from Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, India, Indonesia and other countries.
We were able to communicate with so many indie developers from many other countries.
iOS vs. Android
Interestingly enough, I found that most of the exhibits by indies were iOS or PC games, while almost all publishers who participated in this event were looking for Android games exclusively. Why was that? In my humble opinion, I think it is because iOS is more indie-friendly, whereas Android is more approachable for publishers. Indie iOS game developers don’t need to spend too much time on tweaking their games to be applied to various device configurations, or to worry about how to integrate different billing systems in different markets.
On the other hand, publishers can get more benefits or make more profit by building their own platforms to release Android games on their own markets. By doing so, they can easily provide users alternative payment options such as prepaid cards and PayPal. Moreover, if they have more bargaining power, they can even get revenue share better than 70/30. That is one critical reason why most local publishers prefer releasing Android games than iOS games, especially in China and Korea.
The market potential is high, and indie game developers still have good chances to make a difference.
Someone told me that if indies don’t work with publishers, they will not survive. But I disagree. Although the mobile games market has become very crowded now, it is still growing. The market potential is high, and indie game developers still have good chances to make a difference. There are many possibilities of game design waiting to be explored and discovered. Indies just have to carefully choose and work with the right partners to benefit each other in the long term.
Taking Promotion to the Next Level
I was surprised by the effect of advertising our app on a T-Shirt.
Besides using iPad to showcasing our newly developed iOS game Jade Ninja at Casual Connect, we also brought business cards, stickers, ninja decorators and game icon T-shirts to promote our game. I was surprised by the effect of advertising our app on a T-Shirt. It attracted many participants to inquire and play our game!
There were so many people coming to ask how they can get a Jade Ninja T-shirt for free, so we decided to hold a small contest for those who want to get a Jade Ninja T-shirt on the last day of Indie Showcase. When they were informed that if they reached 3000m in 3 lives (in our game), they won a T-shirt, their eyes sparked and they were very interested in joining this contest.
People loves competition, especially when they consider the prize valuable. Our contestants were not just playing but trying to win. They yelled, cheered, and sweated. Some of them begged for a second chance. One guy even brought his partner back for revenge (but failed).
Finally, two guys succeeded and won their T-shirts. I will never forget their physical and emotional expressions when they played Jade Ninja. It is this kind of emotional attachment toward people that reminds me why I love creating games.
Why Casual Connect Asia?
Media coverage is indispensable for every indie developer. After attending Casual Connect, we earned a chance to get an interview by GameDevFinder from Singapore and to be reported on INSIDE from Japan. Furthermore, we have established a connection and relationship with many game developers and publishers.
Compared with GDC Play and Tokyo Game Show, Casual Connect Asia is no doubt the most beneficial choice to showcase games for Taiwanese and most Asian indie games developers.
I also attended GDC this year, where my friends showcased their games in the GDC Play. Although they did well, it cost them a lot. As the figure above shows, compared with GDC Play and Tokyo Game Show, Casual Connect Asia is no doubt the most beneficial choice to showcase games for Taiwanese and most Asian indie games developers.
I’m so happy that all our team members, Zack, Matt and me, actively participated and had a great time at Casual Connect Asia this year in Singapore, and as Taiwanese indie developers, we do wish in the near future Casual Connect in Asia would be held in Taiwan.
We are Monkey Potion, and we are proud of our game Jade Ninja.
Steve Meretzky and Dave Rohrl at Casual Connect Seattle 2012
The combined industry knowledge residing in the heads of veterans like Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, and Juan Gril is impressive, but at GDC’s Free-to-Play Summit, Steve put a big question mark over the value of it all with the repeated message: “Nobody knows anything!”
Meretzky used the quote from Screenwriter William Goldman’s book Adventures in the Screen Trade to summarize why conventional wisdom is frequently proven wrong, and conclusions derived from past experience are not necessarily predictive. He pointed towards industry pundits’ flip-flopping on the viability of Hidden Object Games (“HOG”s) in Free-to-Play as proof and asked the audience, “Were the experts right before they were wrong, or wrong before they were right?”
Criminal Case on Facebook is an example of the viability of Hidden Object Games in Free-to-Play
Joined onstage by Dave Rohrl, his partner in crime for the popular and evergreen “Social Games Year in Review” presentation, Steve and Dave mixed up the program in a few other ways as well. Instead of focusing tightly on the Social Games market (e.g. - Facebook), which Dave compared to Donald Trump: “Older, established, and there’s definitely some money there, but every so often behaves…well…odd.”, the duo expanded their subject matter to include Free-to-Play game services generally, with a focus on Facebook, iOS, and Android. Further, explained Rohrl, “Like the Thompson Twins and the Ben Folds Five…our group now has THREE members.” For the first time, the established duo invited another speaker to join the fun; Online game industry veteran Juan Gril, Founder & CEO of Joju Games.
Juan Gril
Even fully warned that “nobody knows anything,” it’s hard to discount the trends and observations presented by three long-time game industry veterans, supported by hard data from the Casual Games Sector Reports on Social, Mobile, Fremium, and Casino games (presented by the Casual Games Association and Superdata). Some key observations included the relatively low success rate for Free-to-Play “sequels” (Meretzky), the power of collection and crafting game mechanics contributing to the success of the online CCG (Gril), and an interesting analysis of the relative stagnation of the Facebook top developers list vs. the iOS and Android lists, with a warning to devs that the mobile game market is congealing, so it’s time to get in or out (Rohrl). Rohrl also pointed out that success in Free-to-Play is neither easy nor fast, and often is as much about perseverance as any other factor, citing multiple early failures by both King.com and Supercell before they finally achieved substantial success.
As always, Steve and Dave, and now Juan, presented a well-reasoned, well-supported, and insightful look into the evolution of Free-to-Play games in 2013. Steve may believe that “Nobody Knows Anything”, but checking out their past “Year in Review” presentations from Casual Connect you’ll see that for guys who don’t know anything - they get it right more often than not.
Steve and Dave presented their 2012 Social Games Year in Review at Casual Connect Seattle 2012:
Critical Force Entertainment Ltd is a new game development studio founded in Kajaani, Finland. The studio created Critical Missions: SWAT, a first-person shooter available for iOS, Andriod (released under Studio OnMars) and playable on Kongregate. The company focuses on developing premium and free-to-play crossplatform games with a special focus on the Asian market. So far, the company is self-funded, but investors are welcome.
Veli-Pekka Piirainen is CEO and founder of Critical Force Entertainment Ltd. He is a former studio manager of Supercell North as well as a lecturer and head of Kajak Game Development Lab. Piirainen is also co-founder of NMP Games Ltd.
A student’s hobby project
Veli-Pekka Piirainen
In December 2011, I hired Igor Levochkin – one of the students at a school I taught at – as a programmer in my new startup company after following his work for the past two years. Igor and I would make games for the Apple AppStore, and we started making a prototype of a game called BomberBall. At the same time, Igor put his hobby game project in Kongregate. Early January 2012, Igor showed me that there were hundreds of players playing his hobby project game, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just thought it could be a good marketing channel for our iOS game.
However, at the end of January 2012, there were a couple of thousand players playing it and I started to get more interested in it. I gave Igor a Sony Xperia Play phone and told him to port the game to that device. Igor managed to have it up and running in a matter of days. Next, I told Igor to port the game to iOS; this was bit more difficult since he was not familiar with Mac and Xcode. After a week, the game was also running on iOS. Now I really started to see some potential in the game. Despite all this work on Igor’s project, we also continued to develop BomberBall because I wanted to have a good prototype for the GDC in San Francisco. I demonstrated both prototypes at the GDC and Igor’s project, Critical Strike Portable, gained more interest from the public. After that trip, we decided to concentrate fully on Critical Strike Portable.
Keeping up with high popularity
Igor started fulltime development on Critical Strike Portable by adding new weapons and features. I still worked part time at the university and couldn’t fully concentrate on the game development. I trusted Igor and also a team of Russian volunteers, who supported us in the growth of the user community as well as map creation. Another important task was to make a proper and more user friendly User Interface (UI) for the game. Unfortunately, Unity 3D’s tools for this job were pretty limited and we didn’t have any artist or UI specialist in our team to design a nice, good-looking and functional UI. So Igor made a “coder-style” UI with many different settings and options inspired by Counter Strike style menus. That UI was easy to use with a mouse, but for mobile phones with touch screens, we needed a different kind of UI.
The user interface of the mobile version.
Because I was inexperienced in game marketing, I hired Teemu Riikonen in April 2012 to lead the studio as well as take care of publishing and marketing of the game. Our next employee was Thanabodi Thongchat, a 2D artist from Thailand. She started designing backgrounds and UI graphics for the game in June 2012. Igor implemented more and more features to the game like new game modes, zombies, graphical effects, as well as fixing bugs. We released new versions on Kongregate weekly and got feedback from players on how to improve the game. At the end of June 2012, we had nearly 30,000 daily average users playing the web version of our game, but we were still growing.
We got over 1 million downloads in one month.
On June 26th, we released a free Android version of our game with exactly the same UI and almost the same features as the web version. Even though it was not so easy to use and the menu elements were pretty small on a phone screen, its popularity surprised us. We got over 1 million downloads in one month.
But the problem was that many players didn’t continue the game after their first try. Only hardcore players did so. We decided to create a totally different and simpler UI for mobile devices, because the current quality was not good enough for Apple’s AppStore to sell it as a premium game.
At the end of August 2012, two game development students, Olli Lahtinen and Aapo Lehikoinen, started their internship in my company. They started to build a totally new UI, added new controls for the iOS version of the game with a new NGUI toolkit we bought from the Unity Asset Store and started to design new maps for the game with Hammer editor. We also needed new character models, guns and animations for the iOS version. Modeling and animations were outsourced to freelancers in Thailand and our Thai artist was leading that work. Unfortunately, the quality was poor and delivery was very late. After that, all animations were outsourced to two Finnish startup game studios and for the modeling of guns, I hired another student.
A screenshot of the zombiemode in Critical Missions: SWAT.
Unfortunately, we had to remake all maps done with the Hammer editor (16 total), because our lawyer said we probably weren’t allowed to use that tool, since it’s licensing agreement is not clear enough. Our lawyer also recommended us to change the name of the game from Critical Strike Portable to something else, because that name reminds too much of Valve’s Counter Strike (Critical Missions: SWAT was born then). Our original plan was to release the iOS version in the end of September, but it was released in the end of November due to these difficulties. A new Android version was released just before Christmas, a Lite version in the beginning of January 2013 and the Mac version is in the review process as of this writing.
The iOS market is very competitive
At the end of the year, the amount of our players had increased dramatically. We had almost 200,000 daily players on the web and over 100,000 daily players on mobile devices, but all were playing our free versions. Monetizing with premium version seemed to be much more difficult than we thought it would be. The iOS market is very competitive and full of games, so getting visibility is very hard. We also had bad luck with a very important review, because the reviewer didn’t like our controls at all (many other not so significant reviewers did like them, however). Because of this, we didn’t start to get income fast but our server costs rose dramatically due to the massive amount of users. We also had some trouble with one specific server provider, who just calmly cut off the lines to our map server without any warning due to dramatically risen network traffic.
Looking back
Our biggest mistake was to save money in wrong places and get low quality from our international freelancers. We trusted our own artist’s capabilities to handle leading of the outsourcing, but she was too inexperienced for that. Of course, rates a quarter of the price compared to local studios were very attractive, but then the harsh reality revealed we had to do everything over again after that miserable trial period. It would have been wiser to use more professional outsourcing studios in the very beginning.
Our second mistake was not to solely focus on Critical Strike in the very beginning, but to also make the BomberBall prototype. Something else I would change was not to have a tighter management; everything went forward more or less without proper planning and scheduling. A fourth mistake was not to take a professional publisher to publish the premium iOS version. We thought it would be easy to self publish, because we had such great success with the free Android version, but we were wrong. A last mistake was not to pay enough attention to the server capacity, but that was more or less because of our inexperience with servers and also our idea to save money.
The team is currently working on a new game, called Critical Missions: Space. It has the same nostalgic fast paced FPS gaming experience as Critical Missions: SWAT, with the addition of space rangers, space pirates, laser guns, aliens, space themed maps and more.
Next to that, they keep adding more to Critical Missions: SWAT. They’ve scheduled new guns, characters and maps as well as unlockable content for the next update of their very popular shooter.
In the last decade Brazil’s economy has been flourishing, spawning all kinds of new commercial and creative initiatives. Brazil has a fond love for gaming and a growing industry to match it. We had a talk with the cheerful Martin Fabichak, Technical Director of Insolita Studios in São Paulo, to find out more about him, his company and what makes the Brazilian game industry unique.
After Fabichak graduated in Applied Math with a specialization in Programming, he quickly realized that his true passion was game development, leading him to create flash games. In 2008 he joined Insolita where he recently became Technical Director and a partner of the company six months ago.
Size matters
Martin Fabichak's team at Insolita
One of the characteristics of being a young company in an upcoming industry is that you get to create all sorts of games. Insolita Studios has a diverse repertoire, from serious games to teach management skills, to comedic platformers featuring cavemen and devils.
CaveDays allowed Insolita to get noticed in the Brazilian industry, especially after winning the Jogos BR contest.
While they were making three serious games to encourage entrepreneurship in collaboration with professional experts, they decided to make something less serious, yet important on the side: CaveDays. “This cool platforming game allowed the company get noticed in the Brazilian industry, especially after winning the Jogos BR contest for Best Game, a contest organized by the Brazilian government to stimulate Brazilian game design.” Fabichak explains.
To promote their game CaveDays, Insolita published web comics made with the graphics from the game.
The award was the first step to start more, and bigger, projects. Fabichak likes to describe them in superlatives: “Afterwards we made a huge serious game, LudoPark. Pretty much one of the biggest serious games ever made because it’s a real-time multiplayer management game where 40 players compete to manage their business.” Besides this “huge” game, Insolita Studios joined up with the independent Brazilian game developer Abdução to make something “mini” that turned out quite big.
Freekscape from Brazil
Freekscape was the first 100% Brazilian IP in the world market.
The two companies joined forces as Kidguru Studios to work on the first Sony-licensed game in Brazil for the PSP Minis platform, Freekscape. “We’re the only licensees for Sony.” Fabichak explains. “There is no one with a PS3 license here. It’s really hard to get that in Latin America. Being able to get Freekscape on the PSP Mini platform was a unique opportunity for us.”
Developing Freekscape took Insolita’s international relationships to another level in many different ways. “We developed a prototype with 3 levels and took it to GDC in 2009. There we got in touch with the publisher Creat from the US that gave us the opportunity to work with Sony that was looking for games for its new PSP Minis platform that had yet to be announced.” Fabichak recounts.
Sony was really happy with the way Freekscape fitted their original idea of the type of games they wanted to offer on PSP Minis.
Compared to other PSP Minis games, Freekscape was a big mini. “Out of 40 levels we had in this project, only 15 remained in the game,” Fabichak admits. “We did not know that Minis would mostly be smaller-sized casual games. Most games come down to 1 or 2 hours of playtime, with a lot of replay value, of course,” Fabichak explains. “But Freekscape was disproportionately bigger with about 8 hours of gameplay. We believed and hoped PSP Minis was going to be a platform for small studios with big ideas.” Was Freekscape too big to be a Mini? “Sony was happy with the way Freekscape fit into their original idea of the type of games they wanted to offer on PSP Minis.”
Lessons from the little devil
At the Sony booth at GDC 2010. On the left is Daniel, Founder of Abdução, and on the right is Fabichak's partner, Winston Petty, founder of Insolita. Freekscape was a joint project of Abdução e Insolita as Kidguru.
Fabichak is happy with having an odd-one-out on a platform that has tough competition with delivering bite-sized portable games. He is proud of the game it turned out to be, but especially the lessons and relationships they gained through it. “We learned a lot from Freekscape. Especially in maintaining a relationship with an international publisher and a big player like Sony.” Fabichak says. “One of the things we struggled with was developing for Minis at such an early stage. Developing Freekscape before PSP Minis had even been announced, brought some difficulties, specifically nearing the end of our development cycle because the requirements and features for PSP Minis changed from one week to the other.”
Fabichak does not take his hardships for granted, however. “During this time, we had a great relationship with Vicious Cycle Software, who made the Vicious Engine we worked with. They helped us with a lot of issues. They even made some tweaks to the engine to help us out with some of the issues,” Fabichak recounts. “But when it came to one of the specific requirements from Sony, I spent about a month in the engine’s source code trying to solve it. That was really hard, especially since it came out of the blue, nearing the end of development.”
Now we can approach publishers and companies like Sony with much more ease.
“Despite these problems, we had great help from Sony.” Fabichak admits. It also gave them more confidence to step things up. “Through this project we now talk to others on a whole other level. Now we can approach publishers and companies like Sony with more ease. You can’t reach this level as a company without earning your stripes with a previous project. Now we have the credentials to talk to them and prove we can deliver on what we propose, and our partners know that. We feel like we’re on another level now.” Fabichak says proudly.
The second part of Fabichak’s interview will be published next week, including his views on the Brazilian game industry, Insolita’s current projects, and his effort to inform upcoming talents about the real world of game development in Brazil through his podcast, Doublejump.
