Zombie RPG - Interview @ The Reticule

Dhruin

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Brian Mitsoda has been interviewed at The Reticule about ZRPG but he isn't giving away much yet:
TR – Brian, you used to work with a slew of RPG developers and worked on Vampire the Masquerade, how has your experience working with those companies influenced DoubleBear?
Brian – Ten years of experience on what not to do, that helps a lot. I started DoubleBear because I wanted to design and write for projects that I wanted to do, and didn’t want to spend the rest of my career waiting for the design crapshoot to deliver a decent project and/or having control over a title so that I don’t have to worry about the publisher “Wheel of Fate” landing on “lemon” and getting several years work flushed down the toilet. Again.
Really, when you look at what’s being made in the indie game market right now, there’s not a lot of RPGs or indie RPG companies out there. I knew there was an audience for RPGs that were less ambitious then the bigger budget titles coming out, but after announcing DoubleBear, we found out that that number was much, much bigger than we estimated. We’re taking our knowledge of RPGs and turning that experience into a project that I think that will be able to compete with larger projects, as far as the mechanics and writing goes. We hope DoubleBear is able to turn out a game that is as satisfying as other well-known RPGs, even if we aren’t pushing the amount of polys that the multi-million dollar projects are.
Thanks Resch on the forums.
More information.
 
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I definatly like the sound of Brian being surprised by the market being "much, much bigger than we estimated."

You can definatly feel the frustration he gives off in the interview in dealing with "publishers."

I don't know why, but just from this snippet I get a real sense of hope from this project. Maybe it's the "much bigger market" or the "not pushing the amount of polys" feeling from this interview. I hope that this is the start of another type of market.

We have indies, but isn't there room for a mix of publisher/indie that caters to niche markets. Granted you're not going to get crazy rich like EA, but isn't there good money to be made in games that have some fans, but not the multitudes that AAA games have. They of course won't have the super duper graphics or voice acting in AAA games, but do people like me who visit this forum and others like The Watch really care about that? Hell, I am as happy as a school girl that Knights of the Chalice has a decent AI (one that actually makes you think) and still retains the complexity of a good P&P game. Still not P&P, but it's pretty darn close. Who cares that it's ugly or has the font from the Goldbox era games. It's a breath of fresh air if you ask me.

Now I just have to fit in time between Drakensang and Knights....uggghhh I'm never going to get any sleep.
 
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I perceive my notion of the new middle market isn't as far fetched, as I might have feared :)
 
mmm i am getting curious for this ZRPG :)
Maybe this will become what the alien rpg might had been? a horror survival RPG.
Would be cool wouldn't it?
I am following this
 
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After reading some reviews for Dawn of the Dead and other older zombie flicks I have to say I'm looking foreward to this if they use zombies like they did in those movies. Who am I kidding. I love zombie movies and don't care if it is a shootem up zombie movie, Evil Dead style, or the earlier ones.

But I never really researched the meaning behind movies like Dawn of the Dead. How the zombies stood for commercialism/other social problems at the time and were really just a background problem to how humans deal with each other and material wealth. The zombies never were the real threat, the threat was us. Oh sure they were definatly a problem, but the zombies are so weak that it was laughable. There is a great scene from one of the Night of the Living Dead movies (not sure which one now there seems to be tons of them, but it wasn't the black and white one) where the main character at the end just walks by one of the zombies laughing/crying when she sees how slow it is and how it could never hope to keep up with her. Then at the end after she is saved it shows just how brutal humans are with the "hillbillys" toturing and killing the zombies for sport.

Interesting reading none the less. I hope they make the game like that where the zombies aren't really the problem or were the catalyst to the breakdown of society.
 
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I thought this was a nice little interview. Like a few other posters, I flashed on this part:
I knew there was an audience for RPGs that were less ambitious then the bigger budget titles coming out, but after announcing DoubleBear, we found out that that number was much, much bigger than we estimated.
I wonder what he meant by they "found out" and if Iron Tower had shared results of a market study it had performed. Not that market studies can always be taken seriously, but they are something you can take to the bank (literally).

If publishers are unwilling to consider market strategies based on anything other than sales histories, then it's up to indies to identify and evaluate whatever markets are currently being ignored.

I'm impressed that Iron Tower was able to attract this kind of talent. Whatever they're doing over there seems to be for real.
 
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