Kick started last year by Stephen Rebeiro, an artist turned entrepreneur hailing from India, indie gaming company Ink Vial Games, based in Harrow, Greater London has recently brought out its second 3D Game titled Circuit Chaser, was released this November for free with in-app purchases on iOS, Android and Amazon Kindle.
So how difficult or how easy it is for building a gaming app?AnimationXpress.com sat down with Stephen Reberio to find this answer and also about the upcoming plans of the studio and he starts the conversation with us by saying,
“The game progresses in speed bringing in the difficulty factor of old arcade games where sometimes frustration leads to an immediate satisfaction when you actually reach a high score.
Stephen, please give us a quick brief of Ink Vial Games?
Sure, we are an independent game developing company with team strength of four. We also work with local and global talents who help us in other areas of production such as music, sound effects and beta testing, to name a few. Ink Vial Games is an indie studio focused on making games the way they’re meant to be made. We keep our games simple, casual and something which everyone can pick up and play.
So, how did you enter the gaming sphere?
I chose to pursue a career in Animation as lifelong passion. Being 7 years in this industry, I’ve worked for companies in India and UK as everything from an animator, lead artist, environment designer, game designer, plus coding if need arises. Being the founder, I lead the entire operations of Ink Vial Games, and have been directly involved with or overseen production of over 8 computer games and interactive 3D projects in last position with Playpit Games in London, prior to the official founding of the company. In India I was one of the lead faculties in working for MEL; and I feel this helped me understand potential in young people and guide them towards becoming game developers.
Describe the game play of Circuit Chaser?
Circuit Chaser is a new take on scrolling shoot ‘em ups, which has been re-imagined in an exhilarating 3D perspective! You play as T0NY as you shoot and fly your way across a stunning 3D environment and collect precious circuits. The aim is to guide T0NY over and under challenging enemies and obstacles in this fast and fun-filled endless run and gun game. Circuit Chaser features stunning 3D graphics and animations, highlighted in beautifully detailed world.As T0NY, players will be able to unleash powers by collecting Powercubes, Powercubes give short burst of powers to give Tony an edge in escaping, such as Magnet, Shield and a full-screen Death move. Players also have to collect circuits, circuits are the main form of currency in the game which allows players to upgrade the power cubes and also customize TONY by purchasing new skins.
How did you come up with the idea of this game?
Before deciding on Circuit Chaser, our intention was to recapture the classic arcade atmosphere which we played as youths. Here at the studio much of our team’s time is spent on playing classic old-school shooters like the Contra series, Space Harrier, Raiden X and Star Fox, just to name a few. To master those games you had to play them multiple to discover the best strategy, and difficulty of the game was just another challenge the player would opt for. Those factors were what we considered while making Circuit Chaser. TONY which is our main character in the game was inspired from movies like Pixar’s Wall-E, the premise of the story was to have a character that was dysfunctional, but with quirkiness that makes them lovable.
There are plenty of characters already in the gaming sphere, what is the inspiration behind creating the characters of your game?
Even though there are plenty of characters in the gaming sphere as you said, new characters getting into the sphere never get old. As long as the characters provide a lasting impression it will cater to audiences. We love storytelling. Most shoot ‘em ups neglect any form of story and simply focus on the action alone. In Circuit Chaser we’ve taken the time to construct a character that has a quirky, playful, okay… maybe even stupid side but with all the complexities to make you laugh and cry at the same time.
Can we know more about the art style used?
When creating the Circuit Chaser, the art style was one of biggest challenges; we used a cell-shaded graphical style and heavily relied on baked textures to create a beautifully rendered 3D world. As you are probably aware, the Android ecosystem is very fragmented, and optimising for lower-end devices ($50-$100 Android phones) is one of the more onerous tasks we carry out during the culturalization process.
Pleas share the credits?
Ink Vial Games is a core team of 4 people who are responsible for Circuit Chaser; Stephen Rebeiro, Ieng Kit Liu, Devender Parmar and Caroline Jakobsson.
Stephen Rebeiro: Stephen is the only Production artist at Ink Vial Games; he designed all of the 3D Art, Game designs and leads all the marketing and promotional campaign for Circuit Chaser.
Leng Kit Liu: The only programmer at Ink Vial Games. Luis studied programming at University and recently decided to follow his passion for designing and developing video games. Luis puts the game together and conceives exciting and innovative ideas and gameplay mechanics.
Devender Parmar: Devender loves computers, tell him to take one apart and then put it back together again and he will do it. However, on regular days, Dev is our in-house project tracker and provides us all industry insights and feedback through analytics, he makes sure that we meet our deadlines and tracks our day to day progress. He’ll know everything that goes on in our office.
Caroline Jakobsson: Caroline is passionate about art, she creates all of our concept art and sketches. The team thinks it and she brings it to life on paper. We often tend to go crazy with the ideas and Caroline makes sure that we get even crazier.
What kind of approaches and visions have gone into making this game?
When creating Circuit Chaser, we had to analyze our technical constraints and talents beforehand. During pre-production, the ideas to implement in the game had to be carefully crafted, being a small team there are limits in terms of how much assets and game play elements we can include. Careful considerations had to be made where the limits do not affect the core game play. For Instance we spent time creating our own level generation function that later would allow us to add updates in the game without rethinking the code. Our vision in game production is to create a lasting impression of games among our players, We are here to show that small teams can produce games where our quality can be compared to bigger players in the industry, provided the right talents and resources are carefully selected, hence being closer to the frontline of independent development.
We would like to know the toughest part in developing this game?
Our focus was on graphics, and we made consideration to add extra time in making the game look good on many target platforms, keeping in mind that the architecture available on a range mobile device differs widely, this made graphic and art optimization a challenge.
How did you test the game?
Most of the testing was done in house until the pre-alpha; we approached the online community via various forums and conducted closed alpha testing. All the feedback were tracked and taken into account before launching a beta.
How did you set the difficulty?
Circuit Chaser is an endless shoot-em up; hence the game ends after the player has reached a high score. The difficulty was set by adding six to seven variables that have direct impact on difficulty, the variables acted as a difficulty knob, adjusting the variables as game progresses made the game difficult during progression, however, we can turn these variables back to default when the game is continued after a death, hence creating a short satisfaction to players.
Please put light on the animation medium used?
As it is a 3D game, all of the animations were created using 3D packages and then rendered using a 3D game engine, The characters in the game uses very simple rigs and animation which done using forward kinematics which later were programmed inside the game engine. The animation we chose is of a comic and cartoony style, this makes the game appealing to a wider audience of young players as well as avid gamers. We wanted our game to appeal even to hardcore gamers; hence there are elements of serious shoot ‘em up actions that appeals to players who look for mild fantasy violence.
Would you like to discuss the finances involved?
Being an indie company, we had a very tight budget. The majority of the finances were invested on staff development. Ink Vial Games is a self-funded game development studio and we had to carefully allocate resources around well researched technical solutions and software packages and SDKs.
Can you share the breakdown of the time taken for executing each stage of this game?
Circuit Chaser’s actual production time was 8 months. Establishing the team and getting our infrastructure setup and then beginning pre-production was where we spent the initial 4 months. With our milestones already set, we spent 2 months on production then followed by another 2 months on beta testing and iterations.
What are the elements that you would like to tweak and make a newer version of this game?
We aim to bring new levels and more enemy classes in our next update. The next update will also feature more purchasable in-store items. We are now focusing on more social integration in Circuit Chaser. We have recently added Face book connect features which enables players to compare high-scores with their friends.Our next update will see more social and achievement features.
Were there any challenges on the production front?
There are many challenges to face when producing a mobile game, keeping in mind that the pool of games released on the app stores are extremely high, hence we have produced a lot of features focusing on user retention and segmentation. Getting the right data from our game was crucial, such as active users, user engagement, demographics etc. therefore we included Google Analytics to provide us valuable insights on our game.
Could you inform about the technologies used?
Most of the programming in the game was written in C#, the game was rendered using the Unity3D game engine. 3D assets, models for characters, enemies and environments were made using Blender. We have used the Chartboost SDK for in-game advertisements and Google for in-game analytics. A full list of the third party SDKs used can be found on our website.
On which other platforms will the game be available?
It will soon be available on Ouya console, which we proudly helped to fund during their Kickstarter.
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