Opening dialogue with the community
Relic Hunters Legend is also losing a big feature — local co-op. It only has online co-op play for up to four players, which Venturelli said was a tough decision to make. He’s a big fan of playing a multiplayer game in the same room as friends, but he said that they had to eschew for design reasons.
One of the reasons is the combat is much more long-range; each of the players can jump around and maneuver around the environment. For local co-op, it would have been tough to keep all the characters on the same screen, and Venturelli says they would have to implement some kind of split screen. Though that may sound simple, Rogue Snail would have to redesign the whole game, and on top of that, it would make for an ungainly interface.
Venturelli draws on his experience with Dungeonland, which was a multiplayer dungeon crawler with a split screen. He developed it at the previous game company he founded, Critical Studio.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
“In Dungeonland you had to design all the screens to allow for four players to interact with it,” said Venturelli. “That made the UI much harder and much less clear to the player. You had a lot less space. You had to cramp a lot of things. Things that you could do in one screen for one player you had to do with multiple screens going up and down. It affects the entire game.”
He knows that some of his players will be upset about the lack of local co-op, but he says that he’s confident it’s the right move. In fact, he says that it’s important for developers to try to open up to players, to take the time to explain things. He’s been talking to players ever since his Chroma Squad Kickstarter campaign in 2013, and though he says it’s a really scary experience to be honest with them, it’s ultimately been very positive.
As an example of a situation, Venturelli points to how a lot of people accused them of running a scam when they released Relic Hunters Zero for free.
“We started defusing this with lots of conversation and lots of being open and talking to people,” said Venturelli. “I feel like, overall, gaming communities—it’s not that they’re hostile. But they have been trained by our industry to be skeptical. There’s always a new type of scam on Steam. Not really game developers, but faux game developers coming up with new scams every day on marketplaces like Steam. Sometimes you have big publishers doing things that gamers don’t like. They’re always feeling like they’re being taken advantage of somehow, so their natural stance is to be skeptical. You have to have some patience to defuse that.”
When Rogue Snail can put in features that their players want in the game, they do. For instance, they’re designing the controls from the ground up so that they’ll work well with controllers when Rogue Hunters Legend is released for consoles. They’re also making sure the PC controls are customizable.
“Our PC version—probably a lot of that is going to bleed into console versions as well, but our PC version has everything PC players love,” said Venturelli. “We have fully customizable controls. We have lots of options. Everything we feel like people would want to tweak, they can. We have 4K resolution support, super wide screen support, like 21 by 9. We have unlocked frame rates. You can have 150 or 200 if you want.”
A new kind of studio
When Venturelli founded Critical Studio, it was a very traditional setup with traditional processes that he and his team imitated from studios they’d seen in U.S. They soon found that it wasn’t a good fit for them, and they ended up shuttering. After traveling around Brazil and meeting other developers, Venturelli decided to create Rogue Snail, which is more of a loose network of developers and creatives who could jump in and out of projects and all work remotely.
“The core of Rogue Snail is that it’s a remote company,” said Venturelli. “That’s the gist of it. We get the talent we need for each project and create an infrastructure so you feel like you’re in a studio, but you don’t need to leave your home. We have really talented developers in Brazil, but they’re all spread out.”
This helps with the cost of living and enables people to set up their home bases away from crowded cities with infrastructural problems. It also helps prevent crunch time, which Venturelli is adamantly against. The problem with working in a physical space is that there’s a lot of “chair management,” Venturelli says, where managers assume productivity based on how long people are sitting at their desks. But that’s not the case when a team works remotely.
“You just see the work, the results,” said Venturelli. “It’s much easier to see through the illusion of productivity that crunch sometimes gives you. As people start crunching they become less productive. After a week or so, if they’re working 18 hours a day, they’re probably going to be no more productive than they were working six or seven, because they start to burn out and do bad quality or slow work.”
Rogue Snail is also taking an unusual approach to Relic Hunters Legend. Like fellow Brazilian developers Fableware Narrative Design and Firecast Studios, Venturelli says they’re planning on building out the Relic Hunters IP in other mediums. There will be a comic book, and they’re working with a local animation studio Copa Studio to create short five-minute animations to shop around to TV networks.
“We’re really pushing the Relic Hunters universe as an IP,” said Venturelli. “It’s the first time we’re doing that. Usually we contain our games in the games. This time we’re building a larger universe. The comics fit into that, as well as the animation series we’re doing. The comics tell the story of before the game.”
They’re also planning some fun marketing campaigns and Easter eggs around Relic Hunters Legend’s Kickstarter campaign.
“We really like secrets and small details,” said Venturelli. “We’re doing a lot of little [alternate reality game] things in Relic Hunters. The first trailer we released already has two or three secrets in it that we hope people — maybe a year from now, when the game is out, people will come back and watch the release trailer and think, aha, I found something.”
These little secrets flesh out the Relic Hunters’ world, but it does more than that as well: It’s something for the fans who pay attention, much like the rest of Rogue Snail’s approach to the development process.
