Welcome to our interview with Dyadic Games, a studio that is currently holding a Kickstarter for a game that just looks stunning: Sikanda!
For those who are unaware of this beautiful game, have a look at the video up on YouTube!
As always, our first question is for our guests to introduce themselves, so please tell us all about Dyadic Games!
Dyadic Games was founded in 2016 after realizing that the project that later became “Sikanda” turned out to be far more ambitious than just a hobby project. Eventually, I quit my well-paid job as a game developer at my previous employer and became freelancer. This way I had more freedom and more time to spend on developing Sikanda. I hired several other freelancers to make 2D/3D assets for the project as well as other things like music or sound. To pay for their services, I had to earn money first by doing freelancing jobs, mostly in mobile app programming, but some were also related to game development. At the moment, our team is scattered all over the world, but we plan to build up a core team located here in Graz in the future.
First and foremost, I think Kickstarter is a marketing platform. You are promoting your product there and try to appeal to the audience. It may depend on how you define your reward tiers, but basically you are selling something – in most cases your product and some exclusive extras – to your backers, hardly anyone gives real donations (pledges without any rewards). This also provides an interesting opportunity to test the market. Many see Kickstarter just as a solution to their budget shortcomings, but it’s more than that. If you fail to convince enough people for backing your game, you will most likely also fail to sell enough copies after release. Failing allows you to take action and improve long before finishing a product. Another aspect is community building. While being on Kickstarter, you will win a lot of new followers, fans, potential business partners and other contacts from the game industry.
It’s probably not entirely new as some ideas used in Sikanda have been in my notebook for almost 12 years. Although I’ve always been a technical guy, my main motivation behind becoming a game developer was to use games for building worlds and telling stories. As a kid, I also tried writing books and drawing comics, but I was completely untalented in these kind of things. However, I had strong technical skills and learning programming felt quite easy to me.
By playing “Zelda” and “Final Fantasy” I found out that it’s possible to tell stories through games and this is where I wanted to go. Over the years, I had many stories evolving in my head and I felt that an Action Adventure/RPG is the best way to tell them. The games I mentioned before as well as other games like “Terranigma” or “Secret of Mana” had a very unique atmosphere and since the moment I discovered them I always wanted to create something like this by myself.
Fourth question, I am certain a lot of fanboys already asked this, but are there any long-term plans to make your game a physical one?
We have been asked this question a lot indeed in the last few weeks and due to the high demand for a physical copy we started reaching out to publishers. We will do our best to make this happen, but it ultimately depends on how successful we are going to be in getting a deal with one of them.
Fifth question, if we are allowed to know, how far into the project are we? What if it does not get funded?
The programming part, including the technical framework of the game and custom development tools, is the most complete one. We still need to add some special gameplay features and do some overall optimization and polishing, but other than that we are almost there. This is because of the fact that I’m as the project lead are also the programmer, so most of the time I dedicate to the project goes directly into that. However, we still need to produce the majority of content, including characters, dialogues, monsters, items, locations and various puzzle elements. If Kickstarter fails, I would have to continue funding Sikanda with my private income which would slow down the development process significantly. On the other hand, we might be able to find a publisher at the cost of full creative independence.
Last but not least, which game is currently in your favorite console?
At the moment I’m playing Octopath Traveler on Nintendo Switch. It’s episodic structure works perfectly for taking a short break between the demanding tasks related to our Kickstarter and the ongoing development of Sikanda!
Thanks to Dyadic Games for sitting down with us and giving us such a nice insight in their work!
You can find the Kickstarter here! Be sure to also follow them on Twitter!
