Experience of Russian teams' trip to Casual Connect Asia 2016

At the end of May, Casual Connect Asia 2016 was held in Singapore. The Indie Prize exhibition was held as part of the event. Out of 340 games that applied for participation, 100 games were selected for the showcase. We talked to five Russian-speaking teams that took part in it.

Indie Prize is an international program to support independent developers. Casual Connect provides the top 100 with two all-access conference tickets, which include, among other things, free accommodation during the conference.

At Casual Connect Asia 2016, held this spring in Singapore, six projects and five teams traveled from Russia. We will talk about what kind of teams they were and how they went.

“Dictator 2″ and Tigrido

Founded in 2013 in Yaroslavl, Tigrido, which started with autosource, is now actively developing its Dictator series. The second part was released just this spring. It is a mix of turn-based strategy and collectible card game.

As part of the Indie Prize, the game received a nomination for best sound. The main result of the trip, according to the co-founder of the studio, Dmitry Kuzmenko, was that they managed to “air out and reconfigure their brains a little.” “This is just the most valuable thing you get from such events,” he added.

In a conversation with us, he compared Casual Connect with DevGAMM and White Nights. “In general, all three conferences are held at a decent level.”

coloristique and Nikolai skakun

We noticed the coloristique project last winter. Nikolai Skakun, a programmer of the IzHard team, is engaged in a black-and-white first-person puzzle resembling the Portal 2 dilogy in his spare time. So at Casual Connect, he presented not only his own project, but also helped the OVIVO project with the showcase. The head of the latter, Alexander Vilasak, could not get out to Singapore: the game was just coming out at that moment in Greenlight.

The main thing that impressed Nicholas: how the visitors of the exhibition played. “Asians are playing! I have visited a sufficient number of gaming exhibitions with my project. And the first thing that immediately caught my eye: the fact that the guys here were much more likely to pass the demo than the Russians. At CIS exhibitions, people quickly lost interest in my game if they often failed at something. Here, even if the player, frankly speaking, is stupid, he will still pass everything,” the Horse told our publication.

CreepyRoad and Groovy Milk

Moscow studio Groovy Milk is only a year old. It was created by former classmates who, many years after graduation, decided to get together again and take up game development.

Their first project is a beautiful two-dimensional platformer Creepy Road in the spirit of the cult Dangerous Dave. The player in the project takes on the role of trucker Flint Trucker, who, on his way to his hometown, finds himself in the woods in the midst of crowds of distraught animals and people, with whom he – including with the help of a shotgun – will have to deal. The project will appear on consoles and PC this fall.

The developers considered the advantage of Casual Connect to be that the organizers did not forget about them. Plus, they noted that it is very important to have a permanent place at conferences, not a temporary one.

Lordmancer 2 and “Mobile Asset”

The development of Lordmancer 2, a three-dimensional MMO with the mechanics of projects such as Heroes of Might and Magic and Kings Bounty, is being carried out by one of the internal teams of the Mobile Asset IT company.

“We are not pioneers in business,” Anton Telitsyn, the company’s CEO, told us. – “But games are only one of the directions for us so far. Once upon a time, we were engaged in selling various content for push-button phones, including java games. Then we decided to start creating our own games. First there was the mobile casino Slotmobila. In 2008 we released Lordmancer. It was one of the first mobile multiplayer online games. She worked according to the free-to-play model.”

The work of Lordmancer 2, which went to Casual Connect, is carried out by seven people in the office, as well as several autosourcers.

The advantage of the trip to Asia, Telitsyn noted the opportunity to communicate with local publishers and developers, as well as to understand their view of games.

Breath Of Winter and Armatur Games

The Moscow studio Armatur Games is four developers who came together two years ago to make games “for which we ourselves would not be ashamed.” In 24 months, the guys managed to release two mobile projects (Memory Match and Pimp My Mind), and now they are preparing for the release of the third – Breath of Winter.

In the game, the user must rebuild the settlement and accumulate resources, as well as pass text quests.

“I usually compare our game with Oregon Trail and This War Of Mine,” Oleg Parshentsev, founder of Armatur Games, told us. – I compare it with the Oregon Trail, because we also have a lot of text events, where each of the answers can entail one of 3-4 consequences. With This War Of Mine – because of the atmosphere of hopelessness, empathy for the characters and time management, which is also present in our game.”

“At the conference,” says Parshentsev. – “I was surprised to learn that our game can be interesting to the Japanese market thanks to a large amount of high-quality art material.”

He also noted that he managed to extract a lot from the showcase. The guys were debugging the interface right during the event: “every day we had a new build, which we managed to test in a day and make changes by the next day.”

By the way, Casual Connect is currently recruiting projects for the Indie Prize USA. You can fill out the form here. Today is the last day of accepting applications.