Winguel

Q: How big is your team and what does each team member do?

A: We are working with a small team. As everybody knows, the games market isn't easy, so we decided to keep our structure as simple as possible, and hire or contract outsourcing services according to the projects we are working on. I think it's a good formula for small companies as ours. We are five at the moment: I am managing the programming and direction, Gustavo Bülow, my brother, is the art director, Carlos Nicolini works with the art too and Márcio Stein is our musician. Eduardo Freitag is helping us too with additional programming.

Q: How many games did you release until now?

A: Counting our last game,  Winguel, that should be released at the beginning of 2006, we have made five games: Hades2 (2001 - 3DGS 3.9),  Christmas Magic (2001 - 3DRad), Matchball Tennis (2003 - 3DGS 5.5), Der Pferderennstall (2004 - 3DGS 6.2) and Winguel (2005 - 3DGS 6.3). With all these products we've found publishers in several countries, 19 to be precise, including our last contract for Pferderennstall in France, where it was branded as Hippodrome Tycoon.

Q: What is your secret? How do you manage to keep all these games coming one after the other?

A: I think quality, creativity and hard work are the keywords. We have started with Hades2, a production completely independent. We have worked almost two years at it and we weren't sure if we will find a publisher for it. Fortunately Hades2 has become a good game - of course,  with some restrictions - but it was good enough for our portfolio, and it has helped us to find new partners and new projects. We were hired to create "Christmas Magic" for an English company, and we have continued to move forward. With more titles on our belt the contacts have become easier, and new projects have appeared, fortunately, one after the other.

Q: Winguel has an interesting game concept. Can you describe it for us briefly?

A: Winguel is an activities' center, a game pack with five games and some extra material. It's a game focused to casual players, a kind of family game; funny and enjoyable. It's indicated for all ages above six. The games play in a different way for a greater variety, and some of them mimic old successful games, but with brand new graphics. We have followed some concepts requested by the publishers and we have included some ideas whenever it was possible. I think that we have made a good job, and Winguel will become a good game.

Q: What was the most complicated thing to code for Winguel and how did you do it?

A: When programming games, you always have to face some bugs and some situations that request more time than you have imagined to be solved, but Winguel wasn't too complicated when compared with the other games we have made until today. One new thing for us was an opening video that was created with a script that runs real-time in the engine. It worked fine, and I think it's become great. Winguel wasn't a complicated project, and we had fun working on it.

Q: Did you have problems with some of the publishers you’ve used in the past? Please give us some names.

A: One that I can mention is Brasoft; that was the biggest publisher in Brazil, published one of our games, sold it, and we didn't see a cent. This company is closed today, but it left a legacy of loss for several game developers here in Brazil. Another issues here or there, but I prefer to focus and think on the good experiences and on the next projects.

Q: What is, in your opinion, the main ingredient that makes a game fun?

A: I think that a fun game is born from its concept. The story, the characters, the game situations and the playability are the ingredients that make a game fun. I'm not telling that our games are the funniest of the world -  I would like that - but we always try to insert and you can find some ingredients of humor in all our games. It's as a personal mark from our team. I'm talking about the beers in Hades2 or the BiotecLabs and the prison in our tennis game, for example.

Q: When and where will we able to buy Winguel?

A: We are finishing the last details with the publishers, negotiations are going fine, and the game should be available on the first trimester of 2006. The game will be available where our partners usually act: in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, England, Brazil, and others. I hope, many others.

Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners.

A: We have some golden rules here, and one is that you have to show the game to some selected persons, and let them play without telling anything. You can see how the game is on the face of the testers playing. When a tester comes to you and asks, "what is that ?" then you know "that" isn't good enough, and probably you'll have to change it. Another comment is about the color palette of the games. I think it's very important for the objects to match with the scene, as well as the interfaces. It's a concept hard to explain, but sometimes when you look at a game you can perceive if there is something screaming. The textures we use especially  for the models, but for other things as well, have a low contrast. This balance is very important; otherwise, the textures can explode to white, or to the color of the lights, and this gives an artificial feeling. We have seen images like this in several 3DGS projects.

Thank you a lot, Augusto.