Microsoft Community Games, Iphone, Android, Wii Ware…. Indie Game Developers are nowadays becoming interesting alternatives to all those Red Giants and White Dwarfs out the in the game development landscape. After great success with the Flatiron texture baking tool with major game and FX studio productions, 3d-io starts now an initiative to uncover some of the upcoming stars on the market.
Blake Robinson from Paradum Games and Igor Posavec (3d-io, Flatiron) chat about independent game development, Multivaders, Level Editors, Texture Baking in games and all the sweet and sour things through which an indie developer goes every day.
Blake, you and your development team at Paradum Games are creating a unique looking style and interesting game play with Multivaders. Campaigns, skirmish and even a touch of role-playing – can you please tell us more about Paradum Games, the Multivaders Project and what motivated you to start such an ambitious project?
Paradum Games is a small group of people from the industry, including myself. We all have regular day jobs at games companies and work on our projects in our spare time. We’ve all been avid developers and artists for many years now and have been using Paradum Games as an avenue to experiment with our own game ideas.
Our first feature-length game, Multivaders, is a story driven sci-fi adventure-combat game. Set in a fictional future, mankind has given a selection of humanity’s best and brightest the opportunity to explore the galaxy in a one-of-a-kind starship. Through the game’s campaign, you and your friends can co-operatively develop your own character, explore solar systems, planets and colonies, discover and battle new alien races, collect relics and rewards and unlock skills and abilities. There’s also the opportunity to jump straight into simulations of historic wars and battles that have taken place throughout the galaxy in the 16 player skirmish mode. Finally, when you’ve explored and experienced the campaign and skirmish battles, the game provides an elegant editing suite to empower players to make particularly deep and refined user generated content.
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Ranging from character designers to ship, environment and mission editors, we’ve designed the toolset with the average gamer in mind, but have been careful not to sacrifice the functionality an advanced user may wish to master.We really wanted to create a game that had a rich universe full of people to meet, things to see and places to explore. We knew that creating the game’s universe by ourselves was an ambitious project, and with recent releases such as Little Big Planet championing user generated content, we wanted to explore the possibility of a community of sci-fi gamers helping to construct that universe. While the project’s current plans are still ambitious, we hope that we’ll have the assistance of the community once the game is initially released.
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Who are the main target audience and the game platform for the Multivaders Game?
We’re aiming the game at the kind of people who grew up glued to the tv watching their favorite sci-fi tv shows and movies. We provide a universe, aliens, stories and characters as a seed of inspiration and back it up with a toolset that they can use to create their own adventures. We’re hoping to appeal to gamers that love sci-fi as well as creative people that love to tell stories. The game is currently planned for a PC release, though we are definitely keen to explore console versions of the game afterwards.