So, we had this plan for a tactical combat game journeying across the whole country, but within the first month, maybe six weeks in, we kept on expanding on the stories and characters to such a degree that we realized, hey, we’re actually designing things that would be better suited to a standard cRPG. As we expanded the ideas we thought, hey, why not do it in Australia rather than generic post-apoc, which is so often North American or in Eastern Europe? "Great setting for it," I thought, "but why is Australia just not the setting for more games?" The Dev team implements our 3D creations and we love experiencing the last step in the pipeline.Ĩ0.lv: Now, let's talk about Broken Roads, how did you come up with the idea for the game? Why did you choose post-apocalyptic Australia as the game's setting?Ĭraig Ritchie: Jethro and I originally played around with a bunch of ideas – some of which we may want to go back to one day – that centered around tactical combat in a post-apocalyptic world. The Art team is in the same time zone so we are constantly in contact and work very well as a team. Narrative will give us an idea of what requirements to meet to tell the story, as well as what characters, props, and buildings are necessary for the game. Art, Narrative, and the Dev teams work cohesively and give each other helpful guidance and feedback. We are a remote company and have many different time zones, however, we have found a time each day that suits everyone to have a call and catch up on what we're working on. We've had a number of contractors over the last few years so a little over 30 people have worked on the game in total. We were already fully remote before COVID hit, so thankfully we were largely set up for the way many studios have had to adjust to working these days.īianca Roux: There are 14 of us at Drop Bear Bytes plus another six people supporting us at Knights of Unity. We’ve grown to 14 now, distributed across multiple time zones in five countries, so there’s a lot of Slack calls, Google Calendar juggling, and the like. I moved on to a company called Atomedge, where we worked closely with the University of Cape Town in order to bring the students a means of learning photorealistic anatomy in 3D through an app.Ĩ0.lv: Could you tell us more about Drop Bear Bytes?Ĭraig Ritchie: I founded the company with Jethro Naude in January 2019 – a friend since childhood who had worked with on a couple of startups, including a games studio, and we slowly grew the team as investor funding, state funding, and publisher advances allowed. After breaking into the 3D industry, I worked as a Sculptor and Modeler at a 3D printing company. I started as an Intern at a cell phone mobile gaming company, where I modeled props for a game called Snail Boy. I particularly enjoy sculpting characters and bringing 2D images to life in 3D. I have taught myself many of the software packages, knowing that they are a popular means of workflow in the gaming industry, like ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter. My skills have come from a good overview of the 3D workflow in college, watching countless tutorials, practicing my craft, and general work experience. After finishing high school, I came across the leading Animation School in Africa and knew this was the first step in leading me to my dream of working in the gaming industry. I have played games since the young age of 4 and loved drawing characters and anatomy all my Life. I ended up moving to Australia when my wife was relocated for work in 2017 and founded Drop Bear Bytes in 2019 after a couple of years of games marketing consultancy work.īianca Roux, Art Lead: I studied Animation in 2011 at the Animation School in South Africa. Later, they moved me to the Reykjavik office to work on marketing for EVE Online (and I had an awesome 9 months living in Iceland!) before finally splitting my time between their Newcastle and London offices doing marketing and live events on their VR title, EVE: Valkyrie. CCP Games were in need of an email producer and I was keen to get directly into the games industry so jumped ship and worked in their Shanghai office on DUST 514 (and got to do some playtesting of the canceled Vampires: The Masquerade MMO). The digital marketing experience plus familiarity with games landed me a job with NVIDIA doing digital marketing, mostly email marketing at the time, for GeForce and their other brands. I was involved with both surfing and games journalism, then got into digital marketing for some surf brands while still writing for game websites and magazines. 80.lv: Please introduce yourselves to our readers.Ĭraig Ritchie, Game Director and Co-Founder: I was a journalist for about 15 years before moving into the industry.
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