Mooneye-CEO Tobias Graff about risks and rewards of self-publishing and why it might or might not be for you. As you might know we didn’t end up working with a publisher for our first title Lost Ember and ­although we talked to a lot of different publishers of all sizes for quite a while (thanks again to all you very patient indie publishers out there!) we went the self-publishing route in the end. That had a couple of reasons and I want to go into a little bit more detail about those reasons. After all, we are asking you to come to us to publish your game now, so why wouldn’t you just do what ..read more

In 2016, Mooneye Studios won the German Game Award for Best Newcomer. Five years later, the people from Hamburg have ­successfully released their debut title Lost Ember and even founded a publishing label. Let’s talk about it! Debut titles are always something special. For sure, every game ­developer can still remember the first game he or she made or worked on. Experiences don’t fall from the sky, you can only make them yourself. And with many debut titles, the point is reached more than once when you think the game will never be released. This was also the case with Lost Ember by Mooneye Stu ..read more

Canadian entertainment studio Frima combines role-playing and turn-based strategy in a rather unique way. Making Games looks behind the scenes! On the occasion of Kalypso ­Media’s 15th anniversary (Tropico ­series, Sudden Strike series, Dungeons series), the German ­publisher is releasing a highlight, namely the new ­beginning of a classic of turn-based ­strategy. After ­Disciples 3: ­Renaissance, the series that started in 1999 took a longer break and now returns with Disciples: ­Liberation on October 21 on PS4/PS5, ­Xbox One/­Series X|S and Windows-PC. Disciples: Liberation is a mature, dark ..read more

In the extraordinary RPG Suzerain you have to lead your country through a political crisis. Hey, there fellow game developers and enthusiasts. I am Ata Sergey Nowak, the Managing ­Director of Torpor Games. I am a dual ­national who studied simultaneous translation, worked as an event and ­organization manager and a freelance game developer ­before starting our indie game studio. Before ­Suzerain, I worked on four game projects as a freelancer and gathered ­experience from these versatile games. We developed and released Suzerain; a narrative roleplaying game about politics that launched on Ste ..read more

Tackling project management issues with internal tooling. Facing issues during production is something that occurs in every ­project. KING Art grew a lot during the past couple of years, but even way back in 2014 we had three major problems emerging on a regular basis: 1. Who is working on what? During the production of “The Book of ­Unwritten Tales 2” and “The Dwarves” the company had less than 25 people. Even though we had regular meetings, issues would be discussed directly at someone’s desk, in the hallway or at lunch. Therefore, not everyone in the team knew how and when certain things sh ..read more

Thomas Szedlak, editor-in-chief of Making Games Dear readers, as of today, subscribers will receive the new Making Games  – which will ­unfortunately also be the last one we publish. Due to the difficult economic situation in print distribution and especially in the print advertising business, we can no longer continue Making Games. You can imagine that this step was tough for us. After all, Making Games has been around for 16 years. When the magazine was launched in August 2005, many things were different. The magazine was called ­­­­­/GameStar/dev, was published by IDG and appear ..read more

Instead of classic server structures, for the Iron Harvest KING Art relies on microservices. Early in the concept phase of Iron ­Harvest, we knew we could not ­offer a real-time strategy game without real-time multiplayer ­featuring dedicated servers and matchmaking. Our focus was always on developing an ­extensive and great single-player campaign. In addition to that, we wanted to offer a cross-­campaign online “metagame”. This should motivate players to try out all parts of the game with experience points, achievements and regularly changing challenges and offer an incentive to start the gam ..read more

Maren Raabe, Leiterin Politische Kommunikation beim game, darüber, was der Koalitionsvertrag der “Ampel” für die Games-Branche bedeutet. Maren Raabe, Leiterin Politische Kommunikation beim game – Verband der deutschen Games-Branche. Noch nie wurde ein Koalitionsvertrag mit solcher Spannung erwartet. Und das lag nicht nur daran, dass die „Ampel“ eine völlig neue „Dreier“-Koalition auf Bundesebene ist. Besondere Spannung kam auch auf, weil aus den Verhandlungen von SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und FDP in den Wochen ­zuvor – was für das politische Berlin sehr ungewöhnlich ist – kaum Informationen ..read more

Justin Zwack grants insights into the boss design of Iron Harvest. Part 1 is here! The challenges along the way As strong as the first ideas might have been the journey to the final version was quite long and had its own challenges. When I started to work on the different components of the boss encounter, I ­began with a quick pitch that allowed me to convey the overall structure and order of events. This provided a visual anchor while we talked about the different phases and gameplay systems that should support our pillars and fit within the purpose of the boss fight. Due to its very nature ..read more

Justin Zwack grants insights into the boss design of Iron Harvest. Since the early days of video games, boss battles have played a special part in the player’s journey through their favorite games — most of the time serving as intense and challenging ­encounters that push players to their ­limits. Boss fights and their design have become a really good tool for game designers to shape special encounters that stand out from the rest of the game and will eventually be remembered by a lot of players. You can use a boss in a video game to control the pacing and play around with the overall gameplay ..read more