Mag-log in bilang miyembro
Hindi pa gaanong mapag-uusapan ng Fairy Mount Games ang tungkol sa strategy game na Flame, Forest & Flood, ngunit dito ay naabutan namin si Blaze para malaman ang ilang detalye nang maaga at talakayin ang pakikipagtulungan sa industriya, pagbuo ng studio, at indie production.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, I'm in Madeira for the Games Summit and there is a bunch of interesting panels and talks being held here and of course some of them are dedicated to indie studios, to building studios, to finding funding for those studios and to talk about how to deal with the current situation of the industry. Thank you so much for joining us. Blaze, you were part of one of those panels or workshops yesterday and it was about collaboration and it's coincidence because the main topic here at the Madeira Games Summit is collaboration, so which would you say was the main takeaway here? What would you like to share with other potential indie studios and developers that are watching us now about collaboration and about how to work better together in the current industry crisis? So it was a roundtable about new forms of collaboration in games industry in the time when old forms might not exactly work the way they used to work before, right? And I guess one of the main takeaways was it felt like there is a need for some facilitated collaboration between studios to kind of like switch from the model where we feel like we have to compete with each other towards a grander scheme of things where we smaller studios, indie studios, have a lot to gain from collaborating with each other and finding ways to share the findings, share knowledge, share talent even. Things that bigger companies can afford we cannot, right? So together we can sometimes do more even to the point where we can maybe co-develop games together, like band together to make games with slightly bigger budgets or have a little bit more leverage against potential publishers if we bring in more talent, just banding together. So that was I think the most interesting angle that we were discussing but at the same time it was pretty clear that it's probably not going to happen organically. That would have to be something that someone would start actively pursuing and trying to put together some kind of like a weird conglomerate of indie studios, which sounds sort of like a fantasy but maybe, who knows, if someone with enough drive went for it, why not?
Yeah, hopefully we see more and more of that. I think it's also a cultural and regional thing that as you said, indie studios in the past felt like they had to compete with each other and perhaps depending on where you are you have a different idea about that."
"All right, let me ask you about your own studio, Fairymount, and you are about to reveal your debut PC title. Tell me something about it, what can we expect from it? Tell me the genre, what can fans expect from this game? So we have started I think a year and a half now and I've established the studio with Dennis Comtesse, he is the CTO of the company and the two of us met while working at Little Red Dog. That was a company that was making strategy games so we kind of like moved towards that same direction. We are making strategy games, we are basing them on Godot to be as lean as possible but also as modern as possible because we believe that Godot is the future for studios of our size and it is going to be a strategy game. It's slightly different from titles that we've worked on before."
"I guess I can disclose the fact that it's going to be of the cozy variety.
It is going to be multiplayer actually so I cannot reveal much more because otherwise my marketing is going to kill me. When can we expect to learn a little bit more?
We are going to go live with our Steam page I think within a month."
"All right, just in case when you see this it's early May so more or less in June.
Talking about building a new studio, what was the main piece of advice you would give to others that might try doing this in the current environment which has changed a lot in the past decade? It's hard because building a studio right now, starting a game the studio right now is probably one of the craziest things to do and if you do that following the previous knowledge, established advice, you're most likely going to fail."
"Honestly, it's so hard to stand out in any way. If I had to give advice it's understand what the market looks like right now and it's not pretty. Understand what you want to do, how you want to do it and find out a way to stand out. Don't follow the advice of Blaze or anyone else, just kind of copy whatever they were doing or they are doing or trying to do because you're a very different person with very different skills and very different things to put forward. So just find that one thing that makes you different and if you cannot find that one thing that makes you different, I'm sorry but you're probably not going to stand out enough in the sea of games that is being developed right now. So you might just kind of rethink the idea of starting a studio. Now that the studio has been established, I wanted to ask you about your production discipline. How do you approach production of these projects? And also about money, about what you call the smart money in this industry. Those are a little bit like two separate topics. One is with production, I would say every single person that you bring into your team makes your production life harder and harder. And there are very few people out there who can actually actively and efficiently manage increasing studio sizes. So while there was a lot of push in the past, especially with easy money coming in to scale up and go for broke and just release as big of a game as possible, even with very limited capacities or experience. I would say nowadays the production slash investment advice, investment taking advice would be stay as lean and as small for as long as possible, as long as it makes sense because it's just going to make your life easier."
"I've done production for like 15 years now and I still know that it's going to just be easier and simpler for me to manage a small team. So that's why I'm staying with a smaller one.
When it comes to smart money or dumb money, I'm pretty happy to report that most of the dumb money seems to have left the industry. Those were people who were just investing in games just because they felt it felt to them like it's Bitcoin, right? Like you put in a little bit of money and then it's just gonna keep growing until it crashes. Now it crashed, now they are gone. So they went to the next big thing for them or whatever."
"And the people that stayed, the smart money is the money that understands what games are, understands the market, which means it's harder to get it, it's harder to bullshit it into paying you that money. But that means that those partnerships, those relationships are actually so much more meaningful because by taking smarter money, you benefit from the wealth of experience of the people who are giving you that. While just taking random money off the street doesn't give you any of that."
"All right, interesting. And as you just mentioned, you've been working on production for many, many years. Of course, you've worked on This War of Mine, Frostpunk and Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
So yeah, same as we started this conversation, which would you say is the takeaway?
How did they shape you? Which would you say is the lesson learned from those that you are applying right now? Or perhaps something you're really proud of from those projects?
Honestly, I think they spoiled me for a while because I was extremely lucky to work on very successful projects in very quick succession. So for the longest time, I felt that it's impossible to make a game that doesn't sell a million copies, which is a ridiculous statement. I know that. You cannot help it, right? Yeah. But at the same time, you know, like if you have a track record, it's not even just thanks to you or like, you know, it's not me being brilliant. It's just the team's hard work. And I just happened to be there."
"But it takes time to shift that mindset, to understand that games can absolutely fail.
But at the same time, what those games taught me, the experiences taught me was, I think the eye for quality, the kind of like unrelentless pursuit of proper artistic expression of what do you want to say with your game? How do you want your game to stand out?
How do you want this game to be different and unique? And because of that, I just, I'm just not in the business of making clones of other games or just, you know, let's say, let's take game X and combine it with game Y and try to sell it as something new."
"It's, I do strive for creation of something that is authentically unique. And that's a scary territory, especially like, you know, for investors, for publishers, because they are very used to investing in things that are familiar. So as soon as you go, the further you go away from familiar, that becomes the more problematic, the more risky. It's harder to assess, it's harder to understand the market. But at the same time, I do believe that we need those games that just take that risk, even if we're going to crash and burn, like we don't know that, right?
Like we're taking a lot of risks here. We are enjoying the process. We believe in our product."
"But at the same time, we acknowledge how risky it is in today's market, not to be able to say, we are like X, just Y. Yeah. Yeah. And if you have that magic eye now with you, perhaps publishing and investing is something that you would like to do in the future as well?
I don't think I am skilled enough in those particular areas to do so. I can look at the dev team and see whether they are poised to succeed or not. I can look at the projects and see what could be optimized about them in order to make them better. But I lack the whole publishing expertise. Partnering up with people who would be more skilled in that area would probably yield way better results. And right now, I don't think that... I'm a developer. I want to get my hands dirty all the time. I'm technically a CEO, but we're making this game with a very small team. I'm implementing the UI. I'm learning to code as I go because I'm not a coder."
"And I'm just enjoying the process of creation. It's a very, very intimate thing for me and for the team. That's why we just bring in people who are very into just making things with their own hands and having fun with it. It's a very enjoyable process to just be surrounded by these kinds of people. Fantastic. I think that's a perfect way to wrap this one. So thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the rest of the Showblaze. Thank you so much."
