It’s me again! I bring you guys a special, exclusive interview with President Rocket Game, an awesome upcoming game developer with their title due to release later this year.
President Rocket Game is looking to be a satrical point and click adventure game, in which you play as bonkers new president Lloyd The Prez Kinski. With an English voice over planned, strange characters and plenty of decisions to make, it’s shaping up to be quite the title, and hopefully some nice replayability. I got the honor of speaking to the devs this week, and I look forward to showing you who these guys are about!
First of all, tell me about yourself! What do you do?
We’re Matze and Tilly, the two developers behind the point and click adventure President Rocket Game.
What does being a game designer actually mean?
Well seeing this is our first project, we can only speak for ourselves of course. For us it means finally having a chance to work on fun characters, puzzles and story, which is something both of us have been doing for our entire lives for various projects and also as a big part of our hobby.
There has been a great deal of controversy in recent years about micro transactions in gaming. Not so much an opinion, but why do games tend to cut out content to sell later as DLC and lootboxes? Is it to do with development costs? Or is it time related?
The main reason is probably that we pay for unfinished stuff with all the early access games. So maybe we got used to paying for unfinished games too much. There are some genres that have incredibly huge development costs nowadays though. In those cases we can only imagine that a good strategy to get as many bucks out of the game as possible is mandatory for the project. It’s hard to say. We’ve all gotten used to buying things with a single mouse click. That makes it easy to shove “extra” content down our throats.
Tell us about your current project.
President Rocket Game is a classic point and click adventure with a somewhat black scense of humor. You play as president Lloyd “The Prez” Kinski, a megalomaniac world leader, that is on a quest to join a bunch of his authoritarian pals on a trip into space. Into the sun to be more precise. The prez is too full of himself to realize that he’s probably running straight into a trap. But as a player you won’t be stuck to playing an unsympathetic character. The prez will interact and argue with you, as you and your choices decide the outcome of the story and how it will affect The Prez’ character. It should be bizarre in a pleasing way.
As anyone who creates anything, we must all deal with criticism from consumers. How do you go about it particularly in the prolific and viral standard of gaming today?
Just being as honest as you can without making empty promises should do the job. If criticism is constructive it’s the most precious thing you can get out of a community. Even if it is tough. But people who’ll just troll around won’t be argued with. That’s a waste of time.
What advice would you give budding developers into taking the plunge into game design?
Again, this is our first video game, so we don’t want to sound like we think we’re in a position to grace the world with our wisdom. Compared to other projects we’ve worked on, we can safely say though: Try to keep the first project reasonable. Don’t try to make the biggest game ever with every single idea you have pressed into it. Rather make sure you can get it done in the foreseeable future.
If you still have time to play video games, what are some of your favorite ones to play?
That varies a lot. I guess in the last few weeks alone we’ve had a variety from Surviving Mars, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity Original Sin 2, Overwatch, Star Citizen, Wasteland 3 and Total War Warhammer 2 on the menu.
What inspires you to do what you do?
We’re just fans of good or entertaining stories. It doesn’t matter whether those come from gaming, movies, books or in the best case the real world. You can also get a lot of ideas out of pen and paper sessions or things like that. When we were younger we’d even write fluff articles about a sports managing game that we played.
What is the hardest part of your job?
Not getting carried away with new ideas.
What was your favorite thing about game development? Is there anything you find difficult or challenging in dealing with the struggles?
For us as gamedev noobs and one that learn everything by themselves it’s probably figuring out how to implement our ideas into the engine. It’s fun and challenging at the same time.
What lessons have you learned from your first game?
Just about everything we know about video game design!
What are your future project(s)?
President Rocket Game is designed to have a realistic scope that we can deliver in a bug free and fun state. We do have another game idea ready which was the one that got us into video game design in the first place. We want to give point and click adventures a little rejuvenation with modern age humor, trying to get a sense of excitement and even danger back into the gameplay and have ideas for an evolving world with. We’re also big fans of multiple story branches, endings, companions that you can lose and so on. Now this isn’t an official promise that our next project will feature all of that, but in the long term, that is what we want to offer in our games. One step at a time.
If you couldn’t be an game developer, what ideal job would you like to do?
Tilly would be an astronaut. Matze a writer for your favorite daily soap opera.
What is your ideal video game if money and time was no object?
That’s a real tough one. But it would probably be a huge sandbox.