I have a special little article to share with everyone today! TactiCon was a great event recently: a collaboration between Hooded Horse and Firesquid: you can check out my coverage from clicking on the links below. It was an enjoyable time and I hope they do another one soon.

So I’ve talked to the CEO of Hooded Horse on and off for about a year: I first spoke to Tim during E3 2021 while in the Falling Frontier Discord. Timothy Bender has done great work with his publishing house, focusing on awesome strategy games. They’ve taken a good number of teams under their wing, and 2023 in particular is shaping up to be a big year for these guys. I’ve always respected MicroProse as another strategy publisher, but Hooded Horse look set to match them. I was able to grab Tim from his busy schedule for a short interview, and I hope you enjoy a little insight behind what it takes to be a games publisher!

1) You’ve expanded your scope greatly the last couple of years, and I am a big fan of the kind of games you back. What factors do you look for when choosing what game to publish?

Thanks! The primary factor is that there is something for a group of players to love about the game. NEBULOUS: Fleet Command is of course dramatically different from Clanfolk, but both games have elements involved that players can really fall in love with.

2) What advice would you give new developers taking the plunge into game design?

I’d probably be a bad person to give advice on that unfortunately. There’s a lot of steps of learning, trial and error and such that the developers we’ve worked with have gone through, but I’m not very qualified to speak on that.

3) If you still have time to play video games, take some time to tell me what are your favourites?

Ah that’s a good qualification! I do end up getting too busy to play at times. I’ll exclude our own games to avoid sounding like I’m just trying to promote them. I like traditional roguelikes a lot, probably Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup most of all: https://crawl.develz.org/ . I recently had a great deal of fun playing Vagrus: https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_Realms/

4) What inspires you to do what you do?

 It’s wonderful to be able to play a small part in helping developers. Creating a game is an enormous achievement – one that we never come close to in publishing itself – but getting to help these works of art find a larger audience is a great thing.

5) Finally, what’s your plans for Hooded Horse into 2023 and beyond?

We’ll continue finding great games and developers to partner with!

#gamedev #HoodedHorse #indiegame #Strategy #videogames rpg