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Have you heard about the new game Lonesome Village? That puzzle, cozy game inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing.
Well, besides its release date, it’s today; we also have an exclusive interview with the team behind the game, Ogre Pixel, a Mexican studio that made the game possible thanks to the fandom who supported the game on Kickstarter.
So, to get to know more about the game, the team, and the success story of Kickstarter; here is the interview.
Name of study and brief presentation:
Ogre Pixel
Creating fantasy stories in form of indie video games, Ogre Pixel is an indie game dev studio from Aguascalientes, México.
How many video games have the studio made?
With Lonesome Village 6 games.
How many people worked on this project?
It’s been a team of up to 8 people working on Lonesome Village since the beginning.
What is Lonesome Village, and what is it about?
Lonesome Village is a cozy puzzle-solving fantasy adventure with social simulation
We know that Lonesome Village took inspiration from The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing: how did you decide to put both games together to create Lonesome Village as a perfect mix between the two?
The story is responsible for that, this is because there is a town where everyone is happy, then suddenly everyone disappears, and an evil tower emerges from the center of the town. Everyone is kidnapped inside the tower and the only way to freed them is by solving puzzles.
So, that way, we have puzzle-solving on one side and life sim on the other side with the villagers who are free.
How was the process of choosing a protagonist for the game? Why choose a coyote as the main character?
We wanted the main character to be a no classic animal like foxes, wolf, etc., to be the protagonist. Here in Mexico coyotes are common, so that’s why we decided to a Coyote.
We know that the game focuses more on solving puzzles than combat, a big differentiator from The Legend of Zelda games. What was it that led you to decide on this approach to the game?
To keep clean core mechanics, we felt that by adding combat to the game, it would become other Zelda-like games, and Lonesome Village is special because, thanks to its not having combat, it is different than Zelda.
Where do the inspiration for the game's story and characters come from?
Story takes inspiration from a lot of other existing stories like “Star Wars” movies, also from Stanley Kubrick movie “Eyes wide shut” and of course “Fantastic Mr. Fox”. Wes the Coyote is named Wes thanks to Wes Anderson
What is the main message or goal of creating the connection between the game's story and the players?
To help others and find yourself through by doing that. Players will know what I mean when they play and beat the game, but that’s all I can say.
What were the main obstacles in the creation of the video game?
The scope was huge, we underestimated it and thought it would be not easy, but something we could easily control, but the truth was that the scope is really big.
The game was made possible thanks to Kick Starter; it is a success story. Did you have problems promoting support, or what do you think managed to get the support of so many people?
We have been promoting the development of our games on social media since we started Ogre Pixel (2014); I feel that doing that helped us to receive support from our followers, plus the study we made to different successful campaigns.
How difficult was it to get the game on different platforms?
We hired a local company to do the porting for the game; the process hasn’t been easy, we found that very close to launch, there were still bugs on the Switch and Xbox versions of the game, so we all had to hurry to fix the most critical ones and submit patches.
As an indie studio in Latin America, do you consider the challenge of making a quality video game even greater?
Yes, and the reason for that is that in Latin America, we don’t have the experience to create video games from first-world countries like USA and countries from Europe. Here we have to learn at the same time we are doing the work, and that process has errors and mistakes attached.
What advice would you give independent developers with dreams of making a successful video game?
To start small and finish the games, and keep doing that. By doing that, eventually, good games will come!
What's next for the Ogre Pixel studio?
We need vacations! Haha! We are considering partnerships with other studios to create new and cool experiences. And also continue working on new games with new IPs from us.
News related: Lonesome Village releases today; The game inspired by Zelda and Animal Crossing
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