Review Fix chats with Pablo Rodriguez and Cesar Ortega, the minds behind the awesome upcoming fighting game, “Skara: The Blade Remains.†Discussing everything from the inspiration behind the game to their hopes for it once it’s released and their current Kickstarter campaign, Rodriguez and Ortega give a behind the scenes look at what appears to be a damn good fighting game.
For more information on “Skara: The Blade Remains” and the Kickstarter behind it, click here.
Review Fix: What was the inspiration for the game?
Cesar Ortega: Pablo and I grew up together 20 years ago playing video games and criticizing them! We would always highlight the flaws of this game or the defects of that other one imagining how we would solve those shortfalls. So Skara is our attempt to create the perfect video game under the point of view of the end user with all the features we would love to find in a single game.
Pablo Rodriguez: Yes, ten years ago I started my career in video games working on third party projects, then five years ago I started working on Skara on the side, and 18 months ago, Cesar and I quit our day jobs to work in Skara full time.
Review Fix: What games did you play growing up and how do you think they played a role in this game?
Ortega: We spent a lot of time and coins playing Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Combat so our fighting controls are inspired on these. We also played a lot of League of Legends, WoW… from where we are taking the social/group capabilities. We are also using the fast and frenetic action from games such Call of Duty or Team Fortress 2.
Review Fix: What has the development process been like? Any surprises? Hurdles?
Ortega: Although most of our staff has great experience in AAA games, this is our first complete video game as a company so the development has been a titanic challenge and a hyper steep learning curve! The majority of the hurdles came with the use of the new video game engine UE4 in Beta stage a year ago as there were no people in the market with the experience necessary to develop a video game in an efficient way, so we had a lot of trial and error sessions, but after 10 months using the engine we have become very familiar with it. Also, the fact that the engine is now open to subscription increases the number of people with experience on the market.
Rodriguez: I will always be surprised about how the technology changes and things that we deemed impossible to implement in Skara a year ago become more and more accessible to small indie studios such as us. From capture motion to facial and voice recognition that we will hopefully be able to implement in Skara if we raise enough funding.
Review Fix: What’s your favorite gameplay element in the game?
Ortega: Fatalities and combinations are one of our favourites and you can implement them against more than one enemy at the same time. We also love group attacks that allow your army to be more efficient than a few individuals attacking on their own.
Review Fix: Why do you think someone should contribute to the Kickstarter?
Ortega: Skara is a whole new concept that we defined as an MOV – a Multiplayer Online Versus, with adversarial control and combat set in massive multiplayer arenas. It is a unique concept generated after many discussions and conversations with thousands of gamers from around the world and that we truly believe will generate an engaged community.
Rodriguez: For the last 15 months Pablo and I have been working without a salary and we have been employing the team with money raised from friends and family, unfortunately we are running out of it. To keep Skara as an Indie concept we need the community of gamers to support us through Kickstarter so we can cross the finish line.
Review Fix: Who do you think will enjoy it the most?
Ortega: We believe that players of Versus fighting games, MMO and FPS will be extremely attracted to Skara given that the game combines features from all of them.
Review Fix: How do you want it to be remembered?
Ortega: We’d like to believe that Skara will be the best fighting F2P video game in the market and we dream with a world that will be started by the developers and that will continue evolving beyond our imagination by the community of players forever.
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