Interview with Mail.Ru Games about Iron Desert

Today the company Mail.Ru Games has announced a new mobile game – Iron Desert, which is being developed by Studio Nord, which created Jungle Heat. We contacted Mikhail Trifonov, the creative director of the studio, and asked him about the project.

Hi! First of all, congratulations on the announcement! And such a question right away: the setting of Iron Desert is very close to the style of Jungle Heat. Why did you decide not to change it? Was there a desire to experiment with it more radically?Mikhail Trifonov

Hi!

Thank you for the congratulations, but fortunately, the new project is only at the beginning of its journey and it’s too early to relax.

We all played soldiers and cars as children. We have already made a game about soldiers, and now it’s time for cars. But seriously, during the development of Iron Desert, we had several different graphic and ideological solutions for the new project. When making the final decision on the setting, we relied not only and not so much on our preferences, but on the expectations of our target audience. During development, we ran a number of closed tests on the focus groups we were interested in, which eventually allowed us to form an idea of the final product.

How long was the development going on, how many people were employed in the project?If we talk about active development, it took about five months.

The main project team consists of 17 people.

How many employees will support it after the release?Based on our experience, after the official launch of the project, the team only needs to be built up to meet all the needs of the players.

Which is what we plan to do.

After playing a little, we formed the opinion that the game has a much faster pace, why did we go for it?There are several factors that prompted us to move in this direction.

These are both the trends of the modern mobile market, and our desire to give players a more dynamic and addictive gameplay. We wanted the players to always have something to do in our game.

The game map of the campaign is divided into districts. As we understood, this is due to the desire to somehow structure the single. But what about the PvP part? How is it visualized?As in Jungle Heat, we decided not to limit players in choosing opponents in PvP, this is also the answer to the previous question.

Thus, users still have the opportunity to find a suitable opponent in PvP at any time without restrictions. That is why we implemented the plot part in PvE, and left the PvP component as casual and accessible as possible, without overloading it with additional visualization.

You decided to keep the builders in the game (in the original Boom Beach, you can only build one building at a time). Why?In our opinion, one running construction on the base is boring.

And we want the user to plunge into the atmosphere of our game as deeply as possible. After all, the most interesting thing begins when helicopters, air cushion boats, carpet bombing and clan battles appear in the player’s arsenal.

Video has always seemed to me to be one of the important reasons for the success of Supercell games. I myself spent more than one hour watching how some players “took out” others. The question is, are you going to go further, is it possible to negotiate with Twitch or other services to submit your product immediately as ready for such broadcasts?Video broadcasts are really a very important socializing aspect.

However, do not forget that the mobile device market is quite heterogeneous and, unfortunately, not all users can afford expensive powerful devices that can fully support Twitch or other similar services. And we are not ready to lose our potential players because of this. At the same time, we constantly review and study the solutions appearing on the market.

And the last question: what can we expect from Jungle Heat already, how will it develop against the background of Iron Desert?Jungle Heat is a separate project with its own team and it has its own way: further development of clan gameplay, group battles (raids), various in-game events, continuation of the storyline, unique heroes, new opportunities for the development of its base and much more.

We have quite large-scale plans and ideas for both Jungle Heat and Iron Desert, and we are going to implement them to the fullest.

Thanks for the interview!P.S. The release of IronDesert is scheduled for the end of September 2014.