We talked about the results of the year with Anton Mikhailov, creative director of the Tortuga Team studio. He told what the studio has managed to do over the past 12 months.
Tell me, what was the year for you personally?
The year was difficult, turbulent. But I think everyone knows about it anyway.
What was the year like for the company?
Last winter we finished the cooperative action movie Knights of Braveland, but we are preparing it for release only in February 2023.
Knights of Braveland
A decent amount of time was spent on all sorts of organizational issues.
And at the same time, a lot of things have not been done yet.
As for internal production. Frontiers, a DLC with an additional hero adventure for our Spaceland tactics, has been released.
Spaceland Frontiers
We also continue to develop and support our free tactical battler Braveland Heroes.
We released it on the new Yandex Games platform for us, where our game was well received.
Braveland HeroesHow has the situation changed for the company in the gaming market?
The situation on the markets as a whole has been getting more complicated year by year. But now there are problems of a new wave. With the sunrise, so to speak, everything began to move.
There seem to be rules on playgrounds, but they can change at any time. For now, we are trying to focus more on the studio’s products and skills. And where and how to apply them — we will figure out as problems arise.
What was the year like for the genres in which you work?
Our new Knights of Braveland game is a beat’em up with local and online co—op. The meta-game is based on a generated story, so we are sort of between the genres of roguelike and beat’em up.
Both genres are demanding of content. Beat’em up refers to visual content, and “bagels” refers to game design. So, on the one hand, these are relatively popular genres, but the costs for them are high.
However, there is quite high competition in almost any genre now. Unless the Dwarf Fortress clone niche is not occupied.
What are the company’s plans for next year?
Now we are deepening our knowledge in 3d, refreshing the skills acquired during the development of Spaceland.
We also make prototypes and choose the most interesting direction of work for ourselves, in general, we focus more on creative tasks and try to look to the future with optimism.