Welcome to our interview with ManaVoid Entertainment, a studio out of Canada that will soon bring Steamboat Billy after a successful Kickstarter campaign!
My name is Christopher Chancey, CEO of ManaVoid Entertainment, an independent video game development company based in Montreal, Canada. Our studio’s philosophy is to create games that mix and match popular genres in ways that have never been seen before!
Second question, you have already successfully funded and released 1 game through kickstarter and are now working hard on Steamboat Billy. How does Kickstarter work from a developer point of view, could you share some insight into that?
Kickstarter is amazing for a bunch of reasons! For our first project in 2014, Epic Manager, we really needed the initial funds to get the company going and hire the pieces we were missing in order to make the game we had in our minds. We quickly realized that having a community of people who were engaged in the development of our game was really interesting because it allowed us to gather feedback on the direction of the game and we then had beta-testers that really helped us iron out the bugs!
With Steamboat Billy, our objective was somewhat different, since we were already funding a significant part of the game ourselves, what we really wanted was to see if there was a market for the game. Competition for attention in the indie games’ market has never been stronger and therefore it’s really risky to work on a game for over a year and then realize that people don’t really want to play it! With a successful Kickstarter, that isn’t too scary anymore, we know there’s a bunch of people out there who are interested in the game and that reinforces our conviction in the project and the choices we made! Plus we have a bigger community than ever to gather feedback from and additional funds that we can use to make the game better! 😀
Third question, tell us all about your new project Steamboat Billy and what inspired you to make a game like this?
Steamboat Billy is an adventure-RPG where you play a fisherman’s son who suddenly finds himself dropped into a monochromatic world filled with strange creatures. He will have to befriend these creatures to fight alongside him, all while solving puzzles, rebuilding the city of Star Harbor and gradually bringing color back into the world!
Our artistic director Anthony came up with the original idea, his pitch was essentially a creature collection game like Pokemon where you would fish them out of the sea in an old Disney & Cuphead art style. Everyone thought the idea was good (I mean who doesn’t like games with fishing mechanics!) so we started from that premise and molded it into a fresh and elegantly designed game that really stands out from the rest of what currently exists on the market.
Fourth question, your collector version offered has so many amazing goodies. How hard is it to decide what goes into such a collector and what is your personal favorite item?
We were actually surprised to see how many people were interested in the Kickstarter Treasure Chest pack! We knew that with a game like Steamboat Billy, merchandising would be something that we wanted to explore, but we didn’t expect the community’s reaction to be that positive! It was honestly not that hard to figure out what we wanted to put into it, we knew we wanted to have t-shirts, posters and a coloring book for the staff and their families so it was pretty organic to also offer them to our backers. :)I think the most important thing for any physical limited edition is the game’s box, the artwork has to truly represent the essence of the game and be something that anyone would be proud to have on a shelf at home.
Fifth question, if we are allowed to know, how far into the project are we?
We are still fairly early in development, a bunch of our core mechanics are designed and being prototyped, plus we are still exploring ways to make them better. Most recently our combat system has evolved nicely, we now have a traditional RPG combat system with a layer of quick time events for critical hits and parrys as well as a layer of strategy in the use of color based skills. We are still toying with what we call the “Chroma bar” that can be used by Billy in combat, with some match-3 action that can happen once per round… It’s a really fun and funky combat system so far and it’s definitely never been seen before! XD
We’re all super excited with the way development is moving so far, the team is growing and we’re on pace for our November 2019 release! 😀
Last but not least, which game is currently in your favourite console?
Oh man, it has like NOTHING to do with the game we’re working on but right now I’m going through a new playthrough of the Uncharted Series on PS4. Octopath Traveler is next on the list though!
We would like to thank Christopher for taking his time to answer our questions and being so open about his projects. Be sure to follow them on social media.
Twitter and Facebook
www.manavoid.com and www.steamboatbillygame.com
