Have you heard of Tribute Games? Maybe not, but you have to have seen their games; most notably Flinthook! I love this game, there’s something about killing enemies without touching the ground that makes me feel like an extra-special Spider-man. Also interestingly enough they use the same method of randomizing the rooms in each level that we do in The Story Goes On. I’ll talk some more about the game in a later paragraph, but more importantly let’s learn from some French veterans in game development. They’ve been around a long time children, so listen close and gobble every word of wisdom up in the interview shown below.
For the hearing impaired or non-millennial who prefers to read large blocks of text instead of watching a short video(like the guys at Tribute Games), I’ll talk some more about “pacing your dev cycle”. I apologize for how short that discussion runs in video and will go on this page, but I just started gushing while talking to Yannick about his game and he’s got such a great personality.
Something we’ve talked about in the last video was: when to decide a booth is right for you. When specifically in the cycle you should show the world your game. The team over at Tribute asks themselves this question a lot and very much has to do with the development cycle of an indie title. A few years ago, Yannick goes on to say, a team might want to showcase the game up to a year in advance, but current trends suggest that indie titles only have a few precious moments in the gaming community’s eyes before passing on(due to flooding). We see this a lot with early access titles that get a huge buzz at E3. A couple years down the road I tend to ask my self “Did We Happy Few ever come out? Oh it did? A year ago?”. Now Tribute Games choosing to attend the convention with two completed games to showcase and say: “It’s out now, you like it? Go buy it.” We’ll start to refer to this as “The Netflix Approach” in future discussions.
I want to write about Flinthook and Mercenary Kings, but screw it, nothing will sell you better than the trailers themselves. Click their logo to visit their site and just play it. By god just play them. And drink plenty of water, your health is important and although crunches are productive and fun, too many will kill you. Learn from Yannick’s youth, the game will be done eventually.
