The St. Petersburg studio Orc Work is currently working on its second game – the role-playing battler Evilibrium II. A closed alpha testing of the project has recently started. In this regard, we talked with the producer of the team about preparing the game for release.
Hello. I know that you often go to conferences. Your team has visited at least six in the fall alone. What for?
Sergey Himmelreich, producer Orc Work
Hi! We call it guerrilla marketing. We allocated a small part of the budget for marketing. As many as we could find. And we decided to use these funds only to attend various conferences and gaming events.
Is there a result?
A photo with Tim Schafer from MGF.
Seriously, now we are trying to create a media coverage. Our priority task at each event is to meet with the maximum number of journalists and bloggers. We pitch the project to anyone who can write about it or tell others.
The thought is that if everyone writes about us a little bit, then sooner or later information about the game will reach all our potential players.
There is an effect both on publications and on preliminary registrations. We are currently gathering a loyal core of users with the help of publications.
The goal is not to recruit a lot of players, the goal is to recruit a loyal community ready to move the project into the future, increase its audience and spread information about the project.
What exactly is the effect? Did you count the conversion (for example, you received 100 publications that led to such and such a number of pre-registrations)?
Yes, we have a file in which we register the results of our activity. And so far they are unsatisfactory.
But there is a simple hypothesis. First, the project is promoted among colleagues, then among journalists, information spreads, they begin to hear and talk about it… But it takes time.
The effect is cumulative – it does not happen immediately. After some time, information about the game will be so widespread that at the output we will get more organic precisely due to search queries and the familiar navanie / picture. This is the ultimate goal.
Honestly, I do not know if this will work. This is an attempt to apply the experience of colleagues from independent companies, which I have read about in various publications. The experience of guys like the authors of Out There, for example.
I liked their concept: first, small publications write about them, which are easy to reach, then medium-sized ones, and then the turn of the big ones comes. And I am a supporter of this idea.
Getting through to PocketGamer or TouchArcade is a problem. I hope that climbing the ladder of publications, we will crawl to major media, get our audience.
Do you believe that even publishing in such large publications will give something?
I had experience of paid publications. And, of course, the effect was small. But we have hardcore. We are not working for a casual audience, but for the one who just reads such resources. At least, the one that is easier to convert into users with the help of these publications. Again, the goal is not to get a lot of users, but to create a core that will pull the project at the start.
Is the goal of finding an investor/publisher in front of you?
Yes, of course, we go not only to talk to the media. We are considering the proposals of publishers and potential investors, sponsors. Our budget is quite small.
So yes, publishers are also interesting. Especially those who have a target audience close to our project.
And how publishers look at hardcore projects in general today. On what terms are they ready to communicate, what conditions are they rolling out to the project?
On the one hand, they are happy to look at midcore hardcore, because such games are well monetized.
And, in a conversation with them, it is often said that it makes sense to farm segments, and not try to cover everything (there is a lot of competition in the market). We already have quite a lot of offers from publishers who are ready to take up the project – even at the early alpha stage.
On the other hand, those publishers that focus on Asia… they doubt it. They like the mechanics, but they are not sure that the graphics style will suit their market. Although, admittedly, we deliberately focused the artistic style of the game on Europeans and Americans, since for us this is a more understandable audience than any Asian one.
If they want a different style, but they like everything else – are they ready to finance the redrawing?
We’ve been thinking about it. We even have specific offers for each region. But I don’t really want to do this. The spirit of the project, the game world and its artistic style are very interconnected. To change something for the market means to move away from the canons of the game world we invented.
I’ve had enough of games that are tailored exclusively for business. I do not exclude that I look at my studio as a business, but first of all, I think of the game as a source of new impressions and discoveries for the player. We have a well-thought-out, well-developed world – such a full-fledged franchise (hopefully someday). And the gloomy, Gothic style chosen by us fits well into the history of the game world.
Perhaps somewhere we could do a facelift in the anime, but with the preservation of gloom. Yes, there is such an option in my mind, too, but, I note, I am not fully focused on the Asian market yet.
If there are proposals, does this mean that Evilibrium II will not be published by your company and not by the parent company (Zillion Whales), but by a third-party?
The priority goal is still to try to publish yourself, although it is very risky. We showed the game to Apple representatives. If you manage to get a feature from the App Store platform, then why not try it yourself. But – again – it is unknown whether it will work. If there are difficulties, we will certainly have to negotiate with the publisher. But I consider them, first of all, as an alternative if we ourselves cannot “fly” well.
Previously, you announced support for AppleTV. Why do you need it?
There are two goals being pursued here – selfish (there is still low competition in the TV store) and interesting – to try to look at our game as a home entertainment in front of the TV.
There aren’t many games on Apple TV right now. The platform is quite free compared to others, so I want to focus on it, among other things, because of the better visibility of the game in the store.
Plus, we tested the game on TV. On the big screen, the game looks great and is played well (under the complex interface of the game, the control was optimized not without problems). The idea is already wandering in the heads and go to the console.
But if we talk specifically about AppleTV, I repeat, for a small studio without a marketing budget, this is quite a good approach: to get out where there are few applications yet.
Despite the fact that the console has been on sale for more than a month, it is still not entirely clear how to work with it. Tell me, was it difficult to spoil the game for her?
It’s too early to say that everything works well there. The main problem is management. A special remote control with a touch area and an accelerometer has been developed for the 4th generation Apple TV. The remote is included with the console. Naturally, there are no gamepads included. And with them it would be much easier.
So, this remote control is a special conversation. The game should be adapted to it 100%. It was extremely difficult to do this. But we succeeded, fortunately, our game is discrete, there are no complex controls that require accuracy from the player.
We had to seriously redesign half of the game screens for control from the AppleTV remote. For example, we had to completely abandon the drag-and-drop type of control, saving it only for rare operations on touch screens of phones and tablets.
I also had to make the focus highlighting of active elements on all screens and dialog boxes. Changing the focus on the elements with swipes was particularly difficult: to do this, it was necessary to correctly group the control units on almost every game screen. But I am happy with the final result.
Yes, we also had to remove free movement on the map from the game, which we originally wanted to do. Really lucky. As a result, it only became more interesting.
I think that building a competent UX will be the main problem for most projects on AppleTV.
Plus, it should be borne in mind that we implemented support for parallel control for a gamepad, and for a regular touch, and for a mouse.
But in the end, is it convenient to manage the game now on AppleTV?
Quite!
We recently demonstrated the version at the Unity User Group meeting in St. Petersburg (for which special thanks to the organizers!), and most users were able to easily cope with our interface for Apple TV.
In general, it’s an interesting feeling when you can, sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee in one hand and a remote control in the other, it’s quite easy to play Evilibrium II with a very non-trivial interface and a variety of different activities.
By the way, AppleTV has a limit of 200 MB per device. Is this a problem for you?
Our game takes less time so far. The base pack of 200 MB at the moment fits comfortably.
Although this limitation for the initial build is quite normal, compared to the same 100 MB recommended for App Store and Google Play.If you correctly optimize graphics, animation and sound, you can pack quite well.
In addition, no one forbids you to download the content after the start of the game
Last question. You said that you also want to go to full-fledged consoles. And I know what you want on Steam. But they don’t like fritupley there. Moreover, they do not like mobile. Aren’t you afraid that karma will hit?
Yes, it may have a negative impact. I hope that those players who will be ready to live in it for a long time will not send negative rays into it.
I know that the attitude towards f2p games on Steam is very tense, but we have a fairly soft monetization. We have removed paywalls in the hope that flexible management of individual offers will work as a positive message to monetization. We motivate people to buy, not stimulate them with artificially created tension.
Plus, our project is cross-platform. Players who play on a PC may well encounter those who play on mobile phones, consl and on TV. Given the fact that the battle is synchronous PvP – it will definitely be interesting to play.
I’m not afraid of Haight. I hope that Steam will be able to give us the attention of even more people who are interested in the Evilibrium project, with its original setting and a combination of popular mechanics.
Thanks for the interview!