Above: Surf’s up … on a stingray?
GamesBeat: Do you fish yourself? Is that something you and your brothers like to do?
Gan: We love fish, and we love animals. I wanted to become a veterinarian, but my parents said no. We go to aquariums a lot and go fishing. We love nature.
We’re from Malaysia, a tropical country, so the seaside, the oceans, there’s a lot of things for us to explore in nature. We wanted to bring that into the game, want to put simulation on top of RPG. Sometimes, when we’re really tired of life, we want to go home and play something casual. When you feel like doing something casual, you can go fishing. You can go cultivate your farm, raise your Magnus, something simple. Talk to the NPCs, give them a gift, do your daily routine. But when you feel like it’s time to be a hero, you can hop back into your main story quest.
Since it’s an RPG, it’s definitely going to be important. The main quest will be an important part of the gameplay. We want to have a combination of both, a balance, so when you want to go through the storyline, you can play through the RPG elements, and when you want to sit back and relax, you can go for the simulation side of the game.
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We’re trying to get a balance of both, so some people can just play as a farmer while others go for something different. We want to focus on the multiplayer we’re offering, too, the four-player co-op. The reason we wanted to make it multiplayer — we were always playing these kinds of games in single-player. When we’d get an achievement or something special, we’d just cheer ourselves on. There wasn’t anyone to share it with. If we have a small community, something like in Monster Hunter — when you kill a big monster there, you and your friends are yelling, “Hey, we got the first one! we did it!” We just wanted to have that kind of involvement in the game, with a small group of people, family or friends — people you can share the game with in real life, instead of just chatting with your online friends. We wanted to achieve that because family and friends are important as well.
GamesBeat: We’re seeing fewer backers for video game projects on Kickstarter, but so far, you guys are very successful. Why do you think your game has succeeded on Kickstarter now where others have failed?
Gan: First of all, we were really lucky. [Laughs] But to be honest, we really didn’t think about the results. What we wanted to do is just make a game that we developed ourselves and that we want to play. This is a business, and this is a product, but developing a game just to milk players — players aren’t so stupid nowadays. They can do a lot of research and reach out to other people. It’s easy to get information through the internet. Our focus is mainly on the features themselves. We want to implement as many good features that we developed ourselves as we can and that we want to play. Making a game is a creative business. If we’re creating things that we ourselves feel like playing, the community will enjoy it, too. If we’re building a game just with business in mind — we want to make X money in a year — then maybe the game will move toward that monetization rate, but for us, we want to keep things simple. We want to make this game. It’s fun. You can play it together. That’s the result we’ve gotten so far.
GamesBeat: You have a lot of crafting and a lot of cooking in Re:Legend. Did you sneak in any of your favorite foods?
Gan: Oh, definitely. We love food. In Malaysia, food is very important because it’s part of our culture. We have a mixed culture in Malaysia. We have Indians, Chinese, people from the US, local Malays. Food is a big part of culture. One of our friends was a designer on Final Fantasy XV. … He’s from Malaysia. That’s why, in Final Fantasy, in one of the towns you see, the people look Malaysian, and the food is Malaysian, too. It’s cool to implement something from real life into the game, so we tried to do lots of combinations of food and armor and aspects of the setting in the game that give a tropical feeling to the island. But there are still a lot of different biomes in the game. We have a total of five, and we just hit a stretch goal so that there’s an underwater biome. That’s a hidden biome, so there will be six, and a few more are in planning right now. There will be some totally different biomes and a lot of different Magnus you can collect.
Above: Who needs to go shopping for food when you can raise some tasty fish?
Spokesperson: Will there be some things that you can only make using underwater crops?
Gan: Yeah and you’ll have to cultivate your underwater crops in your underwater farm. We have two kinds of farms. There’s your normal on-land farm, and then, you’ll have an underwater farm. You can have kelp and different kinds of special underwater plants, which you’ll need to feed to certain Magnus to make them evolve. The underwater biome, the underwater farm is going to get an update soon on our Kickstarter page so stay tuned.
GamesBeat: Is there a monster you’ve made that you have a particular affinity for?
Gan: It’s gotta be the Dragonue. It’s the blue dragon that we have in the trailer. Because we put a lot of effort into it, and it can evolve into something that hasn’t been announced now. But it’s definitely something really cool. It’s going to be a totally different kind of evolution path, which is really cool. Our team is talking about it almost every day. The way it evolves and the things you need to prepare for it to evolve are going to be really hard, but it’s going to be really fun.
Spokesperson: Is it kind of like the mascot of the game, do you think? I know you’ve been using it in a bunch of artwork.
Gan: Yeah, Dragonue, Momochi….
Spokesperson: Yeah, the Momochi is the sweet little hamster unicorn thing?
Gan: That’s right. They’re the mascots for the game. They’re going to branch into really awesome looking cool monsters in the future.
GamesBeat: Is that the cute one that looks like a Dedenne from Pokémon?
Gan: Yeah, yeah. … For Dragonue, there’s something special that you really need to take care of. It’s going to be different from other Magnus — the way you care for it, the way you raise it. … Some of them will have a linear path, just A evolving to B evolving to C. But most of them will have different forms of evolutions. So far, we’re only revealing the babies, the first stage of the Magnus. They’re going to grow bigger, and some of them are going to be as big as your house in the game.
