Infinity Skies Team Interview: Meet Micah | Development Project Manager
Primer: Interested to hear the viewpoints of a professional game developer? Join us as we present the highlights of the interview that Cooper had with Micah Hrehovcsik of DreamFuel Games, the company behind the castle building game Infinity Skies.
About Micah
Originally from the USA but now situated in the Netherlands
Lead game designer of DreamFuel Games and project manager of the game development team
Had been a professional game designer for 20+ years
Started from mobile games in the era of 16-bit and 32-bit games, built with j2me
Been a game design researcher
Worked on applied games that help to motivate people in the healthcare industry or to educate children, even in crisis management
Only recently started on entertainment games with Infinity Skies
Main task and duties
Number 1 task is to take Sander’s vision and communicate with the development team
Doing wireframes, game mechanics, setting up of rules
Decide what is technically possible and realistic within a certain timespan
Create a structure for the entire team
Setting up meetings, and making decisions together to get different perspectives
Need to be ahead of the game, not behind it
Need to constantly make decisions before presenting to the development team
Coordinate with the Q&A and play testing
Examples:
The CTRL-Z (redo) button in the new demo - every new feature takes up time so it is up to him to decide what to prioritize
Where things are located in the interface - he has to make decisions on little details like these
Game elements that are coming in the subsequent phases
Joining DreamFuel Games
He has a small company called Game Architect Studio that does design and consultancy
Sander invited him to be the game designer
Sander was a student of Micah at HKU - University of the Arts at Utrecht
Now Micah is working with several other students as well, so it is great to see how they had grown professionally
For him, it is very important to be part of something that is positive and brings good to the world
Would not have taken part if he detected something ethically wrong or subversive
Games
Had always played games and am a gamer
However, when he was a researcher, his love for games dipped a little because he had to adopt this analytical approach
These days he just played the game he enjoyed, which broaden his horizon of games he played
All players have different play styles and they are looking for something different from their games
A good game is about getting a good gameplay experience out of it
Understand the rules of the game and how it works
Need to have surprises and variations to it
Need to have this feeling that if a player keeps going, he can master the game
Examples of how he integrated good gameplay experience in Infinity Skies
Pop-up screens of what the controls are - help players to begin understanding how to control the game
Interface - needs a kind of flow to feel natural and easy
Speed of the character moving through the castle - during the playtest phase, the speed is very fast to enable testers to find out where the bugs are. Now it’s slowed down for the players
Need to give players a goal beyond building castles and visiting castles
Will be in the next iterations of the game demo that they’ve been working on
Fundamental to the players so that everyone knows why they are here
Crypto and Gaming
First time he had heard of Bitcoin was when his friends asked him to mine it using his computer
He even had a wallet with some Bitcoins given to him, but he had lost them
He couldn’t quite find the link to games with crypto at that point in time
As he found out more about blockchains, he realised the fantastic things that can be introduced to games
Ownership of game assets - all the things you collect are now yours. If the game companies shut down, your assets are still intact
Big games like War of Warcraft are controlling how people do with the game, hunting people who are selling game accounts or items online. Blockchain allows players to cash out and move on to other games.
Mobile games involve a lot of microtransactions and they keep asking the players to pay for this and that
Just for experimentation, he recently got into the NFT and cryptocurrency markets
A lot of people are sceptical of blockchain and gaming
The games we’re seeing are more like crypto games, which have collective elements with NFTs. They are missing the opportunities of making actual games out of it
The big game companies that tried to introduce crypto into their games had a poor implementation. They added the blockchain elements after they had built the game
Infinity Skies does it differently
Free to play with no barrier to entry, regardless of whether they want to participate in the play-to-earn or not
No underhand tactics to ask players constantly for micro-transactions
Players build up the community
The NFTs used in the game have a purpose and are used as gaming assets e.g crafting assets, unlike other games where the NFTs are just used for trading on OpenSea
“The time that you put into games is worth something so why shouldn’t you be valued for being a player?”
- Micah
Players actually own the games now and game companies work for the players by providing new NFTs, new content etc
Next Step for Blockchain/NFT Games
Will get more popular and adopted once people understand it
A lot of opportunities for game companies to tap into
Blockchain might even revive and save Indie game companies
People who have small art games but don’t want to go on Steam can make an NFT of their own game
This will go back to the old days of having a game in a case
With NFTs, the number of games available to the community is limited so it makes such games more valuable
Can even sell indie art scene of games in limited quantities using NFTs
Everywhere it’s just a numbers game of getting more sales, but blockchain can allow us to re-value unique and limited experiences
Most Exciting Things About Infinity Skies
Getting the early release to players and get to see the reactions
Micro-games in the social mode for people to take part when they are in a castle at a feast
Adventure mode set to come in 2023
Have very talented artists and want to see the game designs nailed down
Excited about building his castle building and trying different ways to ‘break’ his castle
Feels that Infinity Skies is ahead of the curve
They are a game first, built on blockchain
Will make a splash and surprise sceptics
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