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Just A Few Days Left To Help Kickstart Sportsfriends | PSNStores

Just A Few Days Left To Help Kickstart Sportsfriends

Posted by on December 4th, 2012 | 1 Comment | Tags: , , , ,

It is the final push to help kickstart Sportfriends, a collection of local co-op games aiming to release on PS3 sometime next year. Doug Wilson from Die Gute Fabrik answered some of the questions we had about the project. You know, burning ones like how trophies will work. But in all seriousness, each of these indie titles look rather awesome and it would be a shame not to be able to play them on PS3.

Q: Where did the idea of combining four unique indie games into the compilation Sportsfriends come from?

It can be difficult to sell a local multiplayer game by itself. Inspired by other compendiums like Summer Games and Wii Sports, we thought we could do something special by releasing our games together in one package. I had become friends with Bennett, Ramiro, and Noah over the last year, so we were all excited about the idea of collaborating. We had all worked on sport-themed games, so it made a lot of sense!

Q: Besides the obvious reason that J.S. Joust is played with Move controllers why was the PlayStation 3 chosen as the lead platform for Sportsfriends? Did you approach Sony with the idea or did they approach you?

Sony knew about J.S. Joust ever since I showed it at IndieCade 2011, so we had been talking over the months. Sony has a “Pub Fund” program that helps support select indie developers. They also really liked all the games, so they were a natural partner. We knew we wanted to see our games in a console environment. Still, even with their backend support, we need to cover the development costs – in particular, we need to hire an expert coder to port the games. That’s why we’re running a Kickstarter campaign.

Q: How do you think you’ll approach game selection in the PSN version of the package?

Well, all four games will be there, in a new and improved form. Players will be able to select between the games. In addition, we’d like to add a kind of “quadrathlon mode” where players get to compete at the different games back-to-back.

Q: How have you been finding the process of working with kickstarter and was Kickstarter your inital choice for bringing this games to the PS3?

Running a Kickstarter is a lot of work! But we also thought it was the right move for our games. The games themselves are a bit too weird for publishers, and so traditional publisher funding wasn’t such an option. We’ve been out and about showcasing our games at lots of gaming festivals and parties, and so we know people out there love the games! We’re hoping to leverage that grassroots support to crowd-fund the game. Like I mentioned, we need to find the money to pay some expert programmers to port the games.

Q: With such a strange and eclectic selection of games, how do you plan on creating trophies that play into the experience? I can only imagine J.S. Joust trophies getting weird and insane very quickly.

That’s a good question. We know we want to tackle trophies, but we haven’t planned that out yet. Right now, we’ve just been focusing on getting the funds to even do this in the first place. But yeah, I know we’ll want to do something creative with them!

Q:Being the first Kickstarter to be publicly supported by Sony is a pretty big deal. Were Sony fully supportive of you using Kickstarter?

Yeah, totally. They know we need to get the funding somewhere, and they’ve been very supportive of the endeavor.

Thanks again to Doug for chatting with us about Sportsfriends. If you want to see this on PS3 head over to the Kickstarter page and donate.