Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘The Colonists’ With Jemina Crow

Review Fix chats with The Colonists marketing and community manager at Auroch Digital, Jemina Crow, who discusses the game’s development cycle and much more.

About The Colonists:

This relaxing city-building game was inspired by classics like The Settlers and Anno. The Colonists combines charming robots and automated production to make a satisfying settlement building game.

Harvest resources and set up production lines. Construct road, boat, and train transport systems. Discover new lands and battle for survival. Increase the complexity and reap huge rewards as you chase productivity zen.

Includes both peaceful and military campaign modes, challenge trophies, and sandbox mode.

Review Fix: How was this game born?

Jemina Crow: Bristol has a really supportive games development community, that extends in the region, so Auroch Digital knew both the developer and publisher of The Colonists and so when there was the opportunity to bring it to console, we jumped at the chance! It’s a brilliant game and we knew it’d be just as much fun on consoles.

Review Fix: What is your role in the game?

Crow: I’m the marketing and community manager at Auroch Digital. I work closely with the devs who originally made the game and our in house team to get the game ready to go on sale, I manage all the marketing, and update our community with the game’s progress. I also work closely with press and influencers on release on coverage for the game.

Review Fix: What has development been like?

Crow: Auroch’s “Port Gang” really enjoyed working on this project. Development was full of ups and downs, as it always is, but every day was fun. It was quite a challenge to bring a menu-heavy UI based game to consoles from PC, especially when the PC version was so dependent on mouse control. We had to make a lot of smart choices to not lose any of the depth of control while maintaining accessibility. The game being so cute helped a lot in this being such an enjoyable project. We all got quite attached to the various ‘bots, especially teabot!

Review Fix: What games influenced this one the most?

Crow: The Colonists is a console port of the popular PC game on Steam, it has a very positive rating from over 600 reviews. It is a relaxing settlement building game inspired by classic titles like The Settlers and the Anno series.

Review Fix: Any fun stories or wild moments during development?

Crow: We used to play a game where we’d rename ONE of the sheep in a tester’s save ‘Wasteman’ then the tester had to go find Wasteman. We also had this bug where the trees would catch fire and burn away to nothing but the apples would stay hanging in the air unscorched, that was funny. All fixed now of course! Lastly, we wanted to put Toby ‘Teabot’ Draper in the credits (one of our awesome QA testers) but he spelled it wrong so it says Toby ‘Teapot’ Draper and we’re leaving it to teach him an important life lesson. 

Review Fix: Do you think preserving older gameplay mechanics in new games is important?

Crow: When we are porting games from PC to Console we work hard to make the experience just as great on console as it is on PC. For The Colonists this meant keeping the core of how the game played the same but redesigning the UI and controls to feel good and look great on consoles. The heart of The Colonists remained the same though. 

Review Fix: How have your previous experiences in industry helped this game?

Crow: Previously we have ported Megaquarium to consoles from PC so it’s not our first time taking a PC game to other platforms. Another of our previous titles, Mars Horizon which came out in November 2020, was a simultaneous launch across PC and consoles. We learnt a lot doing that game, especially creating control schemes for joypads and catering for accessibility issues on small screens. We learnt so much doing Megaquarium and Mars Horizon and we used those learnings to make The Colonists even better.

Review Fix: What’s next?  

Crow: We always have lots of projects going on behind the scenes at Auroch both inside and outside of games. Make sure to follow us on Twitter or join our Discord to be the first to hear about them. 

Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?

Crow: As well as new UI and controls we added our own Auroch flair to the game. We’ve added new hats to many of the bots, including TeaBot. That one is a particular favourite of the dev team so make sure to keep an eye out for it!

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About Patrick Hickey Jr. 13820 Articles
Patrick Hickey Jr. is a full-time Assistant Professor of Communication & Performing Arts and Director of the Journalism program at Kingsborough Community College and is the chairman of the City University of New York Journalism Council. He is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of ReviewFix.com. He's also a former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and National Video Games Writer at Examiner.com where his work was mentioned in National Ad campaigns by Disney, Nintendo and EA Sports. Hickey was also the Editor-In-Chief of two College Newspapers before he received his BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College. Hickey's work has been published in The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Complex, The Hockey Writers, Yahoo!, Broadway World, Examiner, NYSportScene Magazine, ProHockeyNews.com, GothamBaseball.com, The Syracuse Post-Standard, Scout.com and the official sites of the Brooklyn Aces and New York Islanders. His first book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult And Classic Video Game Developers was released in April 2018 and is chock full of interviews with legendary developers. His second book in the series, The Minds Behind Adventures Games, was released in December 2019. His third book, The Minds Behind Sports Games, was released in September 2020. His fourth book, The Minds Behind Shooter Games, was released in March 2021. The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games and The Minds Behind PlayStation Games were released in 2022 and The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 was published in January 2023. Hickey is also a contracted comic book writer, currently penning his original series, "Condrey," as well as "The Job," "Brooklyn Bleeds" "Dem Gulls" and "KROOM" for Legacy Comix, where he serves as founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief. Hickey Jr. is also a voice actor, having starred in the 2018 indie hit and 2019 Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release, The Padre (also serving as English language Story Editor), from Shotgun With Glitters. The sequel, The Padre: One Shell Straight to Hell was released in February 2021- Hickey also served as a Story Editor and Lead Voiceover performer. He has also done narration and trailers for several other titles including The Kaiju Offensive, Relentless Rex and Roniu’s Tale. Hickey is also the lead voiceover performer on Mega Cat Studios’ upcoming title WrestleQuest, responsible for nearly 90 characters in the game, as well as Skybound's Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, where he voices both Dracula and Renfield, as well as several other characters. He also stars in Ziggurat Interactive’s World Championship Boxing Manager 2, where he performs the VO of nearly every male character in the game. He also worked on the Atari VCS’s BPM Boy.

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