Great process - Great games
The production of Agents vs Villain has started and we wanted to share some concept art with you. This time from ancient Egypt. His goal, to make his appearance in the future seem like a prophecy come true.
Hot on his paws are the Agents fighting to get past the series of ancient but still deadly traps. Can they stop the cat or will we all worship cats?
The team started out with six people. Now we are seven! Christoffer, a great animator and artist have joined us and we want to introduce him to you. So here is a team interview dotted with some artwork from his own portfolio. Enjoy!
Sure! I’m from Tønsberg, about an hour and a quick left turn south of Oslo. I’ve always enjoyed drawing, but got myself a bachelor degree in business before I gathered enough courage to pursue my passion. I also enjoy anything politically incorrect and consume unhealthy amounts of Urge.
When I started pursuing a more creative education, drawing seemed like the most obvious choice. About a year later I figured out I also had a passion for storytelling and animation just seemed like an obvious fit for me. So I went to uni and got a bachelor degree in animation as well.
I’m rather new in the gaming industry, at least at the production end of things, and I guess my feelings now could easily change in the future, but my main rule is to create games that I enjoy playing myself. I can understand why some focus on making replicas of successful games to have predictability with regards to income, but I can’t see myself ever being a part of that mindset. As a game designer I want to be an innovator and not a copycat. I want to be part of the team other teams copy.
I animated the traps, platforms and characters and I used a combination of Flash, Spine and After Effects. We knew the characters were going to be really small on screen and their movements would have to be pretty exaggerated to tell what they were doing. Also, given the nine-day time limit I had to take a few shortcuts here and there and play it pretty safe. For instance the characters have no visible personalities or unique animations. They’re all the same skeleton, but with different skins. The traps are made with a combination of frame by frame and tweens and are pretty straightforward as well.
I’m the animator, but I also do concept art, design and illustrative work if needed. It’s hard to write down my process in a short interview, but a huge part of it is visualizing stuff before I even pick up the pencil. I train my visualizing skills when I don’t have anything better to do which may sound weird, but I feel it makes me work faster when in the trenches.
When they called our name I was super pumped straight away and being a champ feels awesome. When your work is also your passion and you bust your balls every day to make it in a competitive industry like this I got to admit this felt great. Still, even if we hadn’t won I would feel victorious just because everyone that played our game seemed to enjoy it a lot. That, and the fact that our “stand” was always crowded with people validated my main rule: if you make a game you love to play yourself, others will love it as well.
I think this was one of those freak incidents where everything just worked like intended. There were small bumps in the road but nothing major that put a halt in the production. The only thing I can think of was at the very beginning when we tried finding an idea. We spent two whole days brainstorming, trying to find one everyone liked. So I sort of felt we wasted a lot of time, but our fearless leader Dag-Erling insisted on taking our time at the start and said we would save a lot of time on it during the rest of the production. He was absolutely right and in the future I’m going to insist we do the same thing. I did manage to delete the work file for stage one’s background, which is a horribly embarrassing thing to do. I solved that problem by swearing and shouting out loud for a few minutes.
As you might have noticed we haven’t released Spooked yet! Shame on us! But we do have some good reasons for it.
Most of our team members are also working for ASIO, developing educational games. This fall ASIO released two games: ENKI, a web-based MMO and N.E.F. Nevronus, a small game highlighting the misconceptions and myths around epileptical attacks.
The release of these games took up a lot our time and in the end we had to face reality; if we released Spooked this fall the game would be unpolished.
October, November and Desember are months when a lot of large publishers release their games. Often, these publishers have higher marketing budgets than smaller companies such as us. Getting noticed is difficult during these months, so it would be a challenge for Spooked to get the attention we feel it deserves.
The new release will take place the first quarter in 2015.
Our campaign on Epocu is over and we have reached our main goals. We would like to share our experiences, and we hope you find it useful!
Our first step was to look at the other campaigns and how they structured their page. We noted how they tried to visually distinguish themselves from the rest of the games. We observed many colorful pictures and in-game banners. To set us apart, we drew a black and white concept art styled banner.
Then we worked on the text, trying to explain the game in the best possible way, with as little text as possible. I think this might just be our preference, but we like it straight to the point.
As a new company we don’t have any fans, nor have anyone really heard of us or even follow us. Thus we decided to aim for a low number of supporters to make sure we reached the success mark. We first and foremost attempted to achieve this by telling our friends to support us. But even then we could see that the number didn’t really increase as much as we wanted.
After posting about our Epocu campaign on our Facebook pages, our friends would like our Facebook posts, but few people would actually follow the link and do the steps in order to show their support for the game. That is a weakness with Epocu that need some work. People don’t understand how to support the game. They asked why nothing was posted on Facebook right away. Still, we did see supporters ticking in. It didn’t take long to reach the 100% mark of 25 supporters!
You have two indicators to know how the campaign is progressing. The most important one is called the social reach number, which indicates how many you potentially reach when the campaign is over. If someone chose to support our game with a tweet when the campaign is over, the social reach number increases with the number of followers that the tweet can reach.
The other indicator is the percentage of supporters you have, but that feels more like eye candy than anything else. Spooked achieved 200% of the supporters needed. While this looks good, the social reach number is still low compared to some other games on Epocu. The number of supporters required for the campaign to be successful seems unnecessary, apart from measuring your own success. You can pick a low number, and the potential for social reach is just as high.
Although, other Norwegian companies worked very hard to get the number of supporters they set for their projects. Maybe we would work harder to achieve the same if we set a higher number ourselves.
When your campaign ends and is successful, all your supporters will have their support pushed out on the media they were choosing. They are indeed able to write their own support message, but we experienced that most people didn’t do this. Instead they went for the one we wrote:
We regret not paying more attention to the default support text, because this is what the supporter’s friends will read. It should make people want to check out Spooked! We feel our text fails at doing that.
We started this as an experiment and an exercise for the company. We are a new company, and we are trying to pursue a visual branding to be proud of. The campaign helped us in that regard. We had to do a lot of design work, we had to work on text, and we had to front ourselves in public. This campaign made us many experiences riches. That is why we think it has been a success!
You can still show us support and help us reach more people by liking us on Facebook!
We would like to thank everyone who supported us either by following us on Facebook or through Epocu. Also, a big thank you to Epocu for opening doors that were closed before this campaign!