And here's a new addition to the FrenchCows Season !
Meet Ratz'n'Godz and their new game 1Quest, that you can purchase through the season at http://frenchcows.com
So that makes 11 games and 9 studios on our season. Pretty good start!
Rats in dungeons, an adventurer in the middle: you. It's classic, we call it "roque-like" and this kind of games has its own codes: actions are described with little texts, numbers, labyrinths, monsters, the hero progress and loot, a lot.
Antoine Moreau from Ratz 'N' Godz decided to dedicate himself to the genre and gives you his first game: 1Quest, dig into its dungeons and help Antoine improve his game!
1Quest is available on Mac, Windows, and Android.
About the developer, here's an interview :
Tell us about yourself(ves) : how did you get involved in video games?
I’ve made my first game … more than 20 years ago, which make me feel old. It was in Basic on my father’s Apple IIc. With a scenario as complex as a 20 pages gamebook (Yes, this reference makes me feel old too) and graphics made with lines and plots.
Later, after my graduation, I’ve worked at Widescreen Games (a studio in Lyon) during a year, but given the economical state of game industry in France in 2003, I found reasonable to get à job elsewhere.
But the game creation continue to tickle me, and I start again as a hobby 3 years ago until I created my own studio this year !
What does “indie” mean to you? Why did you make that choice?
There is several ways of being independent. In my case, it was for the freedom of working on the game I choose, in a sector (“conventional” rogue like of dungeon crawling) where there is several games of high quality, and free, which does commercial company rarely wander there.
How many of you are there in your studio? Are other people contributing to your work?
I am alone in my studio, but I work with Jul from Storybird Games (makers of the wonderful Finding Teddy) for the graphics and sounds part. It is going to be one year and half we work together but we only meet once!
Where does your name come from?
At start I have think to « Of Rats and Gods », as a reference to the bestiary of all that I will but in the player’s way. But in the end, it was not really the place to make a literary reference. So I’ve reworked the name to end up with « Ratz ‘N’ Godz », whose initials are well suited to the type of game: RNG for Random Number Generator. Some say that this is the true player's opponent in the game.
So in my games you will often going to cross rats at first.
What makes a great video game according to you?
Broad topic. What I expect from a game depends greatly on the type of game:
From certain games, atmosphere, feelings, but not all
From certain games, challenge, well balanced difficulty, but not all.
Certain games need to be immediately pleasant, others need depth.
Certain games need the highest graphics, for others it is completely unnecessary...
I think the main thing to avoid is the tedious in game. The game where you spend too much time doing simple things and/or on not interesting gameplay (like killing 150 rats for a quest).
Why did you decide to join FrenchCows? What do you expect from this adventure?
First of all, pragmatically, it is not easy to get visibility as an Indie studio.
Then, exchanging with players is really precious for me, specifically for the balance of the game. 1Quest wants to be rather rich in content, but the more you add, the more it becomes hard to get a satisfactory overall balance.
Can you tell us a few words about your game?
1Quest is a classical rogue-like. One Hero, some monsters and loot to grab, and innocents to save!
I aim for a game with avergage play about 2 or 3 hours, but a good replayability., with various choice for the player, and a few random in the choice of dungeons. At each step of the quest, the player must choose a new dungeon, with specific rewards that can direct the character development. But you cannot always have the dungeon of your dreams.
The packs will have a three months evolution : how do you plan to benefit from that time? Sharing what kind of content or experience with your players?
We will certainly add more loot, we asked Santa Claus a lot of nice artifacts, which should come into play by then.
Then we planned to make small content packs, DLC type. The first should be around the air with flight mechanics, adding a new race, a few spells, items and monsters!
What are your hopes for both your game and your studio?
In the near future we will add content to 1Quest for 3 months and balance the game based on players’ returns, then we will try to release it on iOS.
After, once the game completed I will definitely spend time to clean internal engine to make the game officially moddable by the players. All content is externalized in XML files, but without documentation I doubt that modders can works on them.
And finally, once all that have been done, I got the basics elements for the nQuest games from 2Quests to 5Quests, so I won’t bore me.