It’s time for another exclusive interview, dear readers! Today we have the pleasure to bring you some brand new information on E.T. Armies, an interesting Sci-Fi themed FPS developed by Raspina Studio, a small indie team based in Iran. E.T. Armies received Steam’s Greenlight blessing in just 16 days, and is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2014.
What can you tell us about Raspina Studio? There aren’t many game development studios based in Iran. How’s it like, and do you get incentives/investors easily?
We formed our team ( formerly called Tigra ) 4 years ago with 8 people who were busy studying in university. We all loved to enter this industry and play with new technologies and possibilities. We’ve tried many designs, many pipelines and many ways to make a game that can offer a super high quality as an indie game. After some trials and errors we’ve decided to stay fixed on E.T. Armies design as our main project. To be honest, the hardest part of our work was our financial and overseas communications limits. We had to invest in the game ourselves. Whether it was about finding a place or buying new hardware it was our biggest obstacle to satisfy financial needs. Being in Iran didn’t make it easier for us either. We almost have no easy access to the heart of game industry to present our game and see possible futures for ourselves. We hope E.T. Armies will become our start in this industry so we can stand on our feet and develop more polished and unique games after that.
Were you surprised to get approved on Steam Greenlight so quickly? Also, did you consider using Kickstarter/Indiegogo for funding purposes?
Of course it was a surprise for us. We were somehow pretty confident about getting greenlight very soon but that was much faster than we thought. We did consider it at some points but having many restrictions and the way E.T. Armies was designed made us believe Kickstarter wasn’t a good choice for us. Right now we believe To improve and get better we have to start new things and use our experience in a fundamental construction of our work. The time for our next step is very close. Spending more time on E.T. Armies at this point is very expensive and not wise. Our next project will be bigger and we will highly consider starting a Kickstarter campaign for it.
What games inspired you for E.T. Armies? Perhaps Killzone, especially for the visuals?
Killzone was our biggest motive, we all loved the game and we used many technical and artistic approach of that game as our reference of what you call” standard” or “perfect”. We analyzed all top FPS games for development guidelines and new technologies and pipelines too.
In the game, we’ll play as a Parsis soldier against the new Earth superpower. Will the game take place on Earth, then? You mentioned a ruined city inspired from Persepolis environments.
The game happens in a small planet far away from earth, the planet is known to be a resemble to the old historical theme of Persian Persepolis in our main story. Therefore it’s just a remodeled environment. In background story people have tried many ways to achieve a peace of mind in such Utopia-like places like that.
Speaking of gameplay, is E.T. Armies going to be a linear experience or did you choose a more open ended route, like Far Cry or Crysis 1/3 ?
The way you play E.T. Armies is much like old school shooter games. Considering our capabilities and resources, we picked a linear route to deliver a more fast paced and focused gameplay.
I understand E.T. Armies is primarily going to be a single player affair, but at the Greenlight page you mentioned looking into the possibility of co-op/multiplayer modes. Are these coming out at launch or afterwards?
We are working so hard to deliver the most and the best we can in the remaining time till our deadlines. Right now multiplayer-online is our highest priority and we will do our best to deliver it with launch but it’s not final so we didn’t announce anything yet.
We’re just days away from the release of two new consoles, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Did you look into them, and what’s your opinion on their relative power? Also, will you evaluate the opportunity to bring the game as a digital download over there?
Being extremely enthusiastic about game development technologies we are all excited about the upcoming generation. We do want to port our game on next consoles and more importantly we love to work our next project mainly on next-gen consoles but the limit of access to both Microsoft and Sony is our only obstacle at this stage. We would really appreciate a chance to work on next-gen consoles.
Your engine choice, UDK, was probably made when Unity was not that popular. Now, most indie developers choose Unity over any other engine, so I’m wondering if you’re going to stick with UE and possibly even use UE4 for your next projects, or maybe you’ll move to Unity as well.
When we picked UDK as our engine we were considering Unity too. As I said we wanted to achieve the most quality possible. Unity is much more suitable for small teams and let’s say it was a better choice for us, but UDK delivers extremely more satisfying visual in expense of more production time. UDK is not designed for small teams ( we are only 7 people right now ) but we accepted the downsides and right now we are satisfied with our choice. We will definitely consider using UE4 in future if we have the chance. Besides we are pretty familiar with unity too so we won’t be having much trouble switching to new unity engine if it gives us enough freedom to work with next-gen consoles.
Lastly, I noticed that you have another project in the works called “The Dark Pledge”. From the screenshots, it looks nice as well; is there anything you can tell us about it, or maybe at least when do you plan to reveal more about this title?
Actually the footages are from three years ago ! It was our first actual attempt at making a complete game. The design was way too huge for us. Since we didn’t want to sacrifice any part of it we dropped the project. We might pick it up again in future when we have enough developers to make it happen but not with current team size.
Thanks for your time!
