Recently Lowkeygaming reached out to Moonspider Studio to ask a few questions. Ceo and Game Director Loris Malek was gracious enough to answer a few questions about Moonspider, the state of the industry, and the methods behind his process.
Moonspider Studio recently released Harold , a reverse platformer staring Arch Angel in training, Gabe and his obviously dysfunctional charge, Harold. To learn more about Harold check out Lowkeygaming’s review here – Harold: A fresh take on a classic Genre !
Moonspider Studios was founded on the idea of top-notch visuals, fun gameplay and high production values; why did you decided to focus on these three things rather than “Revolutionizing video games”?
When we started Moon Spider Studio, the studio was composed of mostly game industry and filmmaking veterans. Our combined experience brought us to those ideas. We then focused on making a platformer with refreshing gameplay and a high level of polish.
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How long did it take for Harold to go from an idea to what it is today?
Making a highly polished game takes time, especially for a small team like ours.
Game Development has never been as accessible as it is today, How do you think the influx of up and coming developers will affect the overall success of the gaming industry?
I think the constant influx is a very good thing; it will help create wild projects, and not a new iteration of the same game that came a year before. Indies can take risks! They are free to test new things without restrictions. That’s what makes Indies like us fun. All of these out of the box ideas will emerge and will redefine video games in the near future.
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As far as I could tell, Harold was not funded on Kickstarter or Greenlit via Steam, what started the decision to avoid these venues and what are your thoughts on Crowdfunding over all?
Moon Spider Studio is a self-funded studio who developed, produced and distributed HAROLD on our own. We found some investors that believed in the potential of HAROLD, so we didn’t have to go through any crowdfunding ourself.
Crowdfunding is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who has a good project and can’t find any money using the classic way.
What is one tip you would give to someone who hopes to break into the gaming industry?
Learn by yourself! Don’t wait for your school or teacher to teach you things. Search, go to forums, be curious and make demos of your work!
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How long did the development of Harold take and what did was the biggest challenge faced?
It took us more than 4 years to develop HAROLD. It maybe seems very long, but don’t forget that we are 8 guys in a small office who wanted to make a AAA quality game, so it took us way more time than the big companies does but at the end, we think that it was worth it.
Almost every aspect of the game was a challenge. When you want to get a very highly polished game, everything needs more attention than usual; you have to check every little detail. The biggest challenge was to keep every aspect of the game at a very high level of polish!
The story in Harold is very fitting to the art style, I half expect to see a cartoon about the game at some point in the future; where did you draw inspiration for such a creative premise? Did you always plan for Harold to have such a cartoony art style or did it just grow into that?
When I imagine a game concept, I always think about gameplay first! But to be able to test and validate a gameplay, there is no miracle, you have to test it. So I created a tech demo of HAROLD to see if my “inverted platformer” idea will actually be fun to play. After some revisions, I had a cool and refreshing gameplay that can be applied to any kind of universe. But now I needed to find the perfect universe that would fit for this gameplay where the player controls the environment instead of the character on the screen.
It took me several months to find the guardian angel world. I was searching for something famous that can move objects so I though previously about Ghost or Spirits, even God, but none of them were working perfectly. Guardian angels made perfect sense for me. The last missing piece of the puzzle was there! After that, it took me one entire night to write HAROLD from scratch (gameplay to story and art style)
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How was it working with a Choir, why Choir music over more simple tunes?
For the Choir music, we wanted, here too, to stay coherent with the guardian angel universe. We needed a music powerful that can give you energy and power when you play. Olivier Deriviere, the composer, did a wonderful job handling this Choir. It was a new experience for them and us too but that’s what we wanted, something fresh.
Harold is out now and available on Steam, What are some ways you hope to improve the game in the future?
We are already working on 2 new updates that will make HAROLD even better.
The first one is almost done and will have a bunch of new customization options: form V-sync to anti-aliasing filtering and some new gamepad control types.
The second one will bring HAROLD into a new level: SPEED RUN with a brand new way to handle the leaderboard which will be more user friendly, with more options and more categories.
It will be ready very soon and should be out before the first official HAROLD Speed Run Competition!
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If Kirby were to eat you, What super power would he get?
The power of controlling the environment like a true GUARDIAN ANGEL does!
