Unsigned

from MCV Develop October 2021

Zordix

Unsigned is MCV/DEVELOP’s monthly initiative to bring the best upcoming indie titles to broader industry awareness. We aim to help them find the support and partners they need to reach the best and biggest possible audience.

HINGE

Hinge is a psychological horror VR adventure. You suddenly find yourself in an abandoned skyscraper, deprived of all your senses and memories. The laws of physics are broken and time is collapsed. The only way to get out is to step into the frightening unknown putting all the pieces together.

Tell us about your game and why you decided to develop it?

Hinge is an experimental VR horror game inspired by Lovecraft. We discovered the capabilities of Unity’s HDRP and then realized that we have to use this technology in an atmospheric game. Then we combined it with the idea that the atmosphere always matters in horror games.

Who do you think the audience is?

The audience is H.P. Lovecraft and horror fans. Also, those who love puzzle games like The Room VR: A Dark Matter.

What experience does the team have?

Hinge is our first PC VR game, but as a game dev studio we’ve existed for over three years. In the beginning we were developing games for locationbased VR. Arcadia has three LBE venues in Russia. Two venues in London and Paris were in the opening stage just before COVID-19 pandemic. So as you can see COVID-19 affected our plans regarding developing games for VR LBE. We’d been planning to develop games for Steam VR a long time ago, but the pandemic forced us to start developing VR games for Steam and Oculus platforms.

Why did you decide to use Unity to create this game, can you tell us anything about using the engine on this project?

That’s an easy question. First of all, Unity has a friendly interface (especially for artists). Secondly, Unity has excellent documentation and great support from the community. Also there is a great asset store which significantly accelerates our work. Besides, Unity has attractive license terms for indie devs.

How long has the title been in development, how long will it likely take to complete?

We started developing Hinge in spring of 2020. We released it on Steam nine months ago and now we are working on porting it to PlayStation VR. We estimate that the porting process will take six to ten months.

What kind of support are you looking for from a potential partner? We are looking for marketing/PR support and development funding.

Developer: Arcadia VR Location: Moscow, Russia / London, UK Team size: 22 Progress: Released on Steam

Contact details:

info@arcadia-vr.com

Oleg Smirnov, executive producer

DUNGEON FULL DIVE

A game for PC and PC VR, that allows players to create their own, completely open ended adventures.

Tell us about your game and why you decided to develop it?

Dungeon Full Dive (DFD) is a game that makes tabletop adventures more immersive than ever before, by providing players with the toolset to create their own custom 3D fantasy adventures.

Instead of the conventional 2D game environments, players can see, interact and walk around in their fantasy worlds and fight combat in first person. In the end, DFD plans to become the platform for tabletop on PC and for PC VR (crossplay supported). We ourselves are active members in the tabletop community, and during the extreme popularity growth of tabletop during the last years, we noticed that many players were longing for ways to make their games more immersive.

Who do you think the audience is?

Generally every person that likes fantasy worlds. It doesn’t matter whether they have prior experience with tabletop or if they are tabletop veterans. DFD’s immersive gameplay as well as its engaging combat takes away many of the initial hurdles that beginners usually have. And, of course, every person that is already into tabletop, was thrilled by the concept of DFD.

What experience does the team have?

TxK Gaming is a video game startup company based in Cologne, Germany. The team, though, consists of international talents that relocated from different locations. It was important to us to build up a team with unique members where everyone has expertise in a different topic: from experienced Unity veterans to animators, artists and networking developers . On top of that, we are working closely with two other studios: Spellfusion & Alpha Blend Interactive. Both are studios with exceptional talents who have expertise in VR development as well as traditional game development.

How long has the title been in development, how long will it likely take to complete?

We started the development of the concept and game design beginning this year and plan to upscale the team to finish the game by the end of 2022/beginning 2023.

What kind of support are you looking for from a potential partner?

We are looking for a partner that can help us with additional funding and potentially with PR and marketing. We are looking for a €150.000 investment. We are in the process of requesting a federal fund, which will multiply the investment of the partner. As we already received the “stage one” funding for the current development of the prototype, we are quite confident, that the stage 2 funding for the development will be granted to us as well.

Developer: TxK Gaming Location: Cologne Team size: 5 Progress: pre-production

Contact details:

khang.pham@txkgaming.com

Khang Pham, founder & producer

KINGDOM BUILDERS

Kingdom Builders is a colony sim with the party mechanics of an action RPG. The gameplay alternates between gathering resources to build your castle and fighting monsters in the dungeons.

Tell us about your game and why you decided to develop it?

Kingdom Builders offers a unique experience in that players can build up a colony on a kingdom scale while controlling a single player avatar. This means that players are working together with individual villagers who they have to manage, train and satisfy. Meanwhile, players will also need to defend their kingdom and defeat monsters in the dungeons to progress through the game.

Who do you think the audience is?

The game is aimed at players who enjoy colony-sim and management games that focus a lot on individual characters (like Rimworld or Going Medieval). The goal is to allow players to build their kingdoms together, recreating the action of a Diablo 2 LAN party combined with the chill base building of games like Terraria.

What experience does the team have?

Tim Reiter (CEO): former founder of Kolibri Games | Daniel Bischoff (CTO): over five years of experience as Unity developer, formerly at Kolibri Games and Popcore | Bri Davis (Design Director): 18 years of experience as a Game Designer | Dominik Hackl (Unity Developer): two years of experience | Maiken Lubkoll (3D Artist): two years of experience

Why did you decide to use Unity to create this game, can you tell us anything about using the engine on this project?

Unity is a very versatile engine with very fast iteration times. The round-trip time between coding, launching, testing is super fast compared to other engines. This allows for a very fast and efficient workflow. The recent developments have really brought the engine further: we are using URP, the new Input System, Cinemachine, and TextMeshPro. Another huge advantage of Unity is how easy it is to implement any kind of tooling. We are relying heavily on code generation and have also integrated a lot of automation tools related to localization, importing and inspecting save files, etc.

How long has the title been in development, how long will it likely take to complete?

The game has been in development for about 13 months now. We currently have plans for the next 18 to 24 months.

What kind of support are you looking for from a potential partner?

We are mostly looking for support in marketing & strategy support and funding. We are currently looking into 2 scenarios for scope which range from €500k-800k to complete.