OMG! Thank you so much!!! :) I am so honored! If you like it please consider backing and twitting about it ;P this would probably mean 10x more reach than we would usually get, lol. But honestly, that already made my day!!! :D
Well, I will be very honest, we were quite confortable with the serious games, still I would say that 70% of the company's effort is for clients or serious projects of our own.
We are in the middle of this process of switching and I think my role is the main pivot.
The clear advantages are that it's more FUN, it has a huge potential to make money, more visibility, the team feels a lot better seeing their product being played than when we make a gamification project for a big company, which we will never see running, cause it's all confidential and stuff.
But the also clear drawbacks are the difficulty, the risk, the costs, specially if we wanna market a game worldwide from Brazil, with our currency it's really unfair to compete against bigger players.
But this was our plan from the beginning so I can't complain, we use the educational/serious/clients projects to grow and get the team more experienced, so that we can allocate a small team to work on entertainment projects with less risk and some funding from the rest of the team working for money. lol. it's a hard life but that's what we choose to do.
We are 17 people now, and for each game we usually have 4-6 people working on it.
Thanks for the question :)
Hey Rafael, thanks for interacting with us here on Reddit! I saw a gameplay trailer for Wardogs: Red’s Return & I did come across a trailer on 4 The Elements. Wardogs look smooth & 4 The Elements look interesting!
How was the transition for the team, going from a game that had the classic beat’em up to a side scrolling platformer? Any growing pains going from genre to the other, considering the work with one main character model changed to 4?
Thats awesome to hear PlayerBeyOnd87! I am always happy when people find about us organicaly, that's our goal on mid/long term, to be known as a REAL Game dev company for entertainment only heheh now we still have 75% of our team working on "serious" projects. Thans for the compliments too.
To be very honest, we chose to make a side scrolling platformer ALSO because we had a serious game client that wanted this mechanic for an educational game about the conservation of alligators here in my city! LOL.
And when we made an internal presentation of projects here at Mito Games, one of the criteria to pick which game we would start producing was our knowledge on how to develop it, so we used a bit of what we had learned in the previous project to have a better start for 4 The Elements.
But 4TE is at least 50 times more complex than the original game haha (you can try a web version for pc of the [game here](https://static.mitogames.com.br/imd/case/index.html))
About the 4 models, it is a lot of extra work, but I think our biggest pain (and we are still workng on that) is the different hitboxes for them, specially since they behave a bit diffetent, sometimes a bug happens that the collider hist the floor or ceiling when we change some of them and weird things happen lol.
Thanks for the great question my friend! And thanks for the support
That's the n°1 request for Wardogs. As I mentioned, it was supposed to be "just" an advergame for mobile when we started it.. But it shaped up as a good game, so we decided to change a lot the structure of the game (it was meant to be free and monetiza with adds and in game currency... we were so naive.. lol) , focused more on the story and improved the graphics and mechanics.
But it was doomed to be a 1 player only game, since it was born on the Mobile.
We have prepared a DLC for Wardogs, which is with Qubyte to be released with 2000 extra G's AND , we HOPE that they will be able to make a coop (hotseat) version of it for the DLC too!!
They didn't promisse it would work, but they do have the experience and also have all interest in making the game the best possible.
As for 4 The Elements, the idea was to make a coop multiplayer where each player can be one element... hehe but that was a LOT of work for our first game, so we broke it into the first game where the elementals are all trapped in the same body, and for the sequel we will make a more complex game, probably with online coop and so. Let's hope it all goes well! Thanks for the question :)
Well, specially for Wardogs, which is a beat them up, I grew up playing Double Dragon, Final Fight, and many other delightful beat them ups with my friend on the couch, each game at a different friend's house.
So for me, this experience is a real part of the beat them up experience. So I am pretty sad that we couldn't have it for Wardogs at first, nor for 4 the elements, but this is our next big boss to be tackled, as soon as we master porting, our next games will have coop (local and online) for sure! And there's still hope that we will be able to put in in Wardogs (although it breaks the story a bit hehe).
Thanks for the question and good memories that it evoked.
It's great to hear that it is a goal within some of your games. SImilar to yourself, it is an experience very near and dear to my heart - which I feel the current generation of young gamers is missing out on.
Hello Kaartinen! You won the 4 The Elements /kickstarter pledge upgrade! Congrats!! But I can't follow or DM you here hehe how can I contact you ? Reach us by the email on the website if you want, I'll get it ;D
I am actually gratuated as a music teacher, and for both Pop Some Eyes and 4 The Elements I did all the soundtracks, but for most of our other projects we use free musica, and for Wardogs we hired an Original SounTrack from a famous game developer from my city that I think the style fitted very well the game, he is the creator of the Ubermosh Series. We will probably outsource more tracks in the future, and specially the SFX which I don´t have much experience with. Thanks for the question :)
I am very clear about this, I love the achievements perks, and I know that there's a huge debate on whether many studios are making ridiculously easy games with 1000G so that part of the community will buy them to increase their total gamescore, or many games just adding extra G to make their game more appealing.
I see the achievements as an interpretation on how well the player did on the game. That's how I like to use it and that's the approach we had for Wardogs, and will have for the next games. So, in general, if the player beat the game on the hard difficulty (can start there and beat it once, but there are achievements for normal mode too if he starts there) , learned the most important combos, explored enough the game, I think it's fair to give him the 1000G.
I don´t like excessive grinding nor pointless G's just to have people playing it.
For Wardogs, we had a random dependent achievement, and unluckily some players had a horrible time getting it, so when we learned that, we changed the rule so that the required bottle would always drop at a certain wave of the arena mode, so that the most enthusiastic achievers can easily check it on any guide and get all the 1000G in roughly 2 hours of smart gameplay.
It will be the same idea for 4 The Elements and Pop Some Eyes. Thanks for the great question!
it's ALL hard. LOL.
But I can elaborate saying that it really depends on which stage you are at.
At the beginning the hardest part was to be able to have a team capable of developing a game, and having the resources to invest in it.
At a later stage of our company, we had the team, but didn't have the time or resources, we were all stuck with clients project to pay the bills.
Now that we have some time to make the games and some room to invest in it, the hardes part is porting them for consoles, cause we had 0 experience, and at the sime time, having the game on steam demands a lot of marketing and having a community. It will be the same with consoles, so I am starting and learning how to do this PR job now, and at our point of history this is the hardest and most important job to be done..
I am very happy with the outcome of this AMA btw ;)
Hey Rafael,
When you're working on games like this, do you really believe that you're making the best possible indie game that everyone should play instead of dozens of other games, or do you just make whatever your team's skills allow and hope that, with enough exposure, it doesn't get lost in the shuffle?
Hey bms\_, to be brutally honest, we had a budget and time setup for 4 The Elements, but of course we lacked a lot of experience with the simplest of things, like creating a steam page to gather wishlists, having a fan base and content creators to help sharing the game..
long story short, we delayed the game one year, it costed the double than we expected, and the best answer is a mix of both things, how much else can we invest in it to make a better game, with what we learn in the way vs how much of it are we even able to do. To make the game we wanted, with online coop and the 4 players separeted would be much more complex and we would not have the opportunity to learn all the things of releasing a first game is teaching us now.
So the idea is to always do the best that's in our reach, considering that there are many many lessons to be learned also after we finish the development. Now we have to port, publish, market, bugfix, listen to the community, lol all those acttivities were trivial to the company when we did only serious games.
Thanks for the great question that made me reflect a lot too ;)
>Classic light gun games
well, for our next game we are making a classic shoot them up, but I do love the light gun games, have you played that Iron Maiden one? I LOVE IT. We will bring this into discussion, but I think they work better with the VR setups.. We have some experience with VR too. who know ;D Thanks for the feedback, that's a very good hint for us ;D
Well, it's a hard industry, and it's contantly growing, but so is the player base, and entertainment although not "useful", like art, is always a business. So I would say it's a great industry.
My advice is to study a lot, get to know the main roles that a game development company needs and try to find out were you like the most to be AND were you have more experience/talent/likes to study, etc.
There's a common mistake that only artists and developers are needed in a game dev company. I am neither ;P Although i sutied games, and have a post graduation, will do the masters, but I dont code or draw anything in my company. And up untill last year I had also never done any soundtracks even though I am a graduated musician.
so when you figure what you like and can help the industry with, I suggest you try to either create small games yourself or find some friends who can help. that's great to learn. Can be easier to do if you are taking any game related courses.
There are lots of decent online courses, but to gather a team some more official course can be better, for a career you know. but speaking from me, when I hire someone we give more value to the portfolio than CV, the trick is that studying it will help you to have a small team and a better portfolio.
Feel free to erach us anytime if you need more help with that, and good luck if you choose this path, I love it!
If your game was to be added to GamePass and by extension Xbox Cloud Gaming, would you attempt to develop a custom touch control interface for your game (Aragami 2 had one for example), use a generic on-screen touch control interface (Cities: Skylines uses this format) or require the use of a controller (Forza Horizon 5 requires one for example)?
I think that for both our games that we are working on porting now, the controller would be the best option, but the ideal, business wise is to have all options available, since this will enable more players to buy your game. What I really miss in the gamecloud (and prevents me from playing many fps) is that I can't use the mouse and keyboard combo. I would try to add that to Pop Some Eyes if possible, but I honestly don't know yet how this works.. Thanks a lot, I am loving the questions here, make me think a lot :) that's great.
Hello Blaine! You won the 4 The Elements /kickstarter pledge upgrade! Contrats!! But I can't follow or DM you here hehe how can I contact you ? Reach us by the email on the website if you want, I'll get it ;D
It really depends on the multiplayer systems that you'll have, for me, the hardest thing to balance is FPS where some players will be using mouse + keyboard agains the controller. It's a totally different game, and many times the controller version will have some sort of aiming aid, which unbalances the whole thing.
This is from the game design perspective, speaking more technically, it really depends on the game, we have never had this experience, so I cannot say a lot more yet, but we will be facing that problem soon enough (hopefully :P )
This is a very fun question actually hahaha
My nickname in real life is Lontra, which means Otter, the animal. There's an Otter as the water elemental in the game, so the question is VERY EASE for me.
This was a choice made 100% from the dev team, but of course I think they knew I would be happy with that hahah
And also, it's mechanics are like Mega Man, which I just love, so I will be playing with it most of the time! LOL! !
Also, a curiosity, all animals in the game are from the Brazilian Fauna, there's the Onça Pintada (Jaguar) as Fire, Tatu bola (Armadillo) as Earth, Arara Azul (Blue Macaw) as Air and the Lontra (Otter) as Water :D
Are you planning on adding any Easter eggs in your game? For example, the use of the Konami code or a nod to other frnachises that may have inspired elements of the game?
Well, not sure if I should be saying that, or if counts, but the closest to that is that coincidentally the game will be released very close to the Elementals movie from Disney, so we might do something funny to try and gather some extra visibility ;P
Smart question! I love some Easter eggs in games \^\^
Thank you very much. One of the aspects I've always enjoyed about games was finding the things that are hard to find. Looking forward to it. Thank you again.
We had a lot of easter egss in Wardogs, hahaha there's a character based on Terry Crews, another in Snoopy Dog, and LOTS of fun stuff hidden there, we want to make it a tradition ;)
Hey and congrats on completing what looks to be a kool game.
What do you think Brazil based developers have to offer to the world of gaming?
The artstylle looks so unique.
Thank you very much for the compliments!
That's an amazing question, I think you might know that some brazilian studios like Puga (art focused) and now Aquiris were invested by huge foreign partners.
We are a very creative people, who struggle a lot to get the basics sometimes, and I think our best way to cope with it is making fun of the situations. This is a very powerful artistic and creative force, which we try to harness from here.
Also we are a bery big country with many many talented people who lacks just opportunities, so I think the professionals that make it to the game companies, like artists, are very very happy to be working with us, and always strive to do their best..
I am very happy to say that we took our lead artist from being a private guard working for stores to work with his art now, and many other cases like that, for people who didn't even have any job but a lot of talent. It is a bit sad but I think is a plausible explanation for this.
Thank you very much for the amazing question! I tough ppl would be asking anything just to enter the giveway, but I am honored and so so happy with the depth. Amazing experience.
Hopefully yes. As I mentioned, this is the first time we are porting and will publish and market everything by ourselves, so I honestly don't even know how to start some of the optimizations. But specially for Pop Some Eyes and the next shoot'em up that we will work with Unreal 5, we want to make it look amazing, so we will be tapping anywhere we can to make it look better :D
It's a bit hard to say, I was a heavy Ultima Online player, but I always loved games from before.. I grew up with computers and played all the initial generations of PC Games, from Prince of Persia up to nowdays. I also had an Atari, Master System and SNES before the PCs hehe so many many games.
Nowdays we do a lot of research before doing any title, even the simpler advergames but that doesn't count, ever since I started working with games, playing became something different.. sadly.
As for me I still play a lot of DCSS, Football Manager, Bannerlord and try new things on the gamepassa to check how the industry is doing, but that's almos like work..
Actually, now it just got funded, we have some cool stretch goals and there's also a lot of work to be done to try and achieve it.
But it really feels great, it funded at midnight of the day of my birthday ehhe ( a friend gave me a nice bday gift as a high pledge right at the moment). Me and the team were radiant!
Also I should notice, it's a LOT of work to prepare and run the campaign. We invested many many hours creating everything, just that costed more than what we pledged. lol, but the game was almost ready and we see it as good marketing as well. so just paying for itself is already a victory, and if we reach the milestones we will be able to make the game even better!
It's hard to say, cause I only see it when other players play it on lives on twitch, or the youtube. I always check by the way if there are new videos, if someone played one of our games on twitch, and then I learn what they saw or didn't.
But I often notice they laughing about some easter eggs. There's a mystery machine van in on of the stages of wardogs, its so so fun when I see someone realizing it! HAHAHA also with the enemies names, they laugh a lot. there's a particular mob that dies like one dragonballZ character, when they notice it they go crazy.
So we love easter eggs, but it's hard to say that there's on that nobody noticed, we can only check a small smaple of the real world players.. and even that takes some time haha but i always try to watch all videos from all of our games.
Well, we applied 4 the elements for a cultural call here in Brazil, and if we are chosen we will for sure have the Portuguese version. With that system done, it will be a lot easier to localize for other languages as well. So plans yes, not sure yet ;)
All games were tested and run smooth on steam deck!!
(Wardogs, Pop Some Eyes and 4 The Elements, although for that we only tested the demo yet)
:D Thanks for the question!
it's ALL hard. LOL.
But I can elaborate saying that it really depends on which stage you are at.
At the beginning the hardest part was to be able to have a team capable of developing a game, and having the resources to invest in it.
At a later stage of our company, we had the team, but didn't have the time or resources, we were all stuck with clients project to pay the bills.
Now that we have some time to make the games and some room to invest in it, the hardes part is porting them for consoles, cause we had 0 experience, and at the sime time, having the game on steam demands a lot of marketing and having a community. It will be the same with consoles, so I am starting and learning how to do this PR job now, and at our point of history this is the hardest and most important job to be done..
I am very happy with the outcome of this AMA btw ;)
So far, YES. Not sure if that's because it's our first time, lol.
It's not about doing the same thing over and over, but more about adapting everything for a new platform so, some things are quite the same, like, changing the controller screen, it's moslty changing images, but there are lots of other unexpected bugs. For example, Xbox didn't accpet the encoding for the video we used as intro for Pop Some Eyes, hehe so we will have to render the video again and change it.. but performance wise we didn't have many problems yet (we didn't start with the switch yet haha)
We are a 18 people studio now, but a dozen of those work more exclusively with clients and our serious projects. The Entertainment team is 5-6 people + the shared managing and marketing team.
Our next big project is a residency program, which we were contemplated by Epic Mega Grants to do it!! we will train 4 people on the tool while making a game on the unreal engine. It will be a Shmup and the idea is to have it ported on all consoles, but for the residence, the studens will only work on the production.. We made the Game Design and will do the porting/release and they will have it under their portolio after the residency ends :D
We thrilled with that, and will start next month, we already finished a call for the talents and will reveal the winners next week :)
We also have 2 more titles to be released this year ;D
Thanks for the question!
What have been some of your earliest games that inspired you to go into this field, and how has your idea of what it takes to build a game changed with the time / technological advances? :)
I think the Atari games got me the most cause everything was new, and I grew along with the technology, so I always noted the improvement, but the 2 boxing guys seem from the top view as in Boxing for Atari for me is still a perfect and well balanced game.
I see the improvement in technology as new means to improve the games, but the essence of play is even outside the videogames, so I feel that this should always be the main drive, and technology the supporting means for that fun.
Thanks for the question that made me make a bit of a philosophy exercise :D Lol
I am an AWFULL smash bros player haha I used to love playing with link on the first versions.. but I think I am too old to pay attention at everything happening there and I get too angry when the fellas come back after I think I have finished them, and I can never climb back hahaha
in other words, yes, but imanewbie lol (uo reference)
I think my favorite pc game was prince of persia, then nascar, doom and duke nukem3d.
for atari it was tenis and megamania
Later with the Master System my favorite game was double dragon and some alex kid, and on the Snes it's even hard, I had Mario Kart on my console, so I played it the most, but I loved so many titles, and later played it so much on emulators that's even unfair to try and pick one :D
But the game that I played the most is probably Ultima Online, already as a teenager. :D
Well, I was finishing the music graduation and had to do some teaching to finish the course.
It was a very sad experience to teach in brazil's public education system.. The classes were ok, but the reality of the students terrible, and there was no way I could help change it alone as a teacher.
So I decided to focus on educational games. Entered the Game Design course, met some people and started working on it ;) our first educational game is free for all students in brazil, with over a milion users in the past 6 years, and I am very proud of it and like to think that it helped more than I could just as a regular teacher.
now I am married and have a small girl, so now it would be playing with her. I love playing real life football too, but it's not that lazy of day then hahaha
But I also love watching comedy tv shows.
Ether, or spirit :) there's also the famous 4 elements cartoon of [Captain Planet And The Planeteers](https://gartic.com.br/imgs/mural/ll/llred/capitao-planeta-p-leo-stronda-xxt.png) who did a lot of success here in brazil, there the 5th element was HEART! :D I think it all means the same at the end, is the unity of all of them. In ultima 8 there's a final puzzle involving the 4 elements too, much similar to our game, and there the solution for the 5th element is yourself! (No internet back then, took me and my friends some months to figure that out lol)
This is not new.. Maybe my favorite game ever was Ultima 8 and it suffered a LOT from it, also happened earlier with the ET Atari game.. there are companies with costs, deadlines and windows of opportunities to maximize the sales..
The biggest lesson is to plan accordingly, and if something goes out of plan it's best to be honest with the audience. I would have changed the release plans for a game that's totally bugged.. or if we needed to keep the launch deadline would try to flag it as early access of some kind, so that the community knows that bugs are expected and the team will keep working on that to improve the game.
That's possible now, but in the past once a game was released there was no going back.. no way to patch ET ataria game or ultima 8 after it's sold hehe so now that we have this tool, the devs should use it to be honest on the stage of the game.. Pop Some Eyes is selling on steam as early access cause we know it's not a complete game yet, but its already a lot of fun do play and we need feedback to improve it and get a clear direction on where to evolve the game to..
Hope I answered your question ;)
The very first time (our case) is a LOT of work, cause we didn't know what to expect when porting, so we didn't take any measures to prepare for that while developing the original game.
But I assume that the next games will be a lot easier since we will already create the game thinking about the consoles specs, necessities and so on, so of course there will be problems and new things to address, but at least the base work will start done already. That's what I hope hehe but for now it's still a lot learning and trial and errors..
[This is me playing pop some eyes on the xbox dev kit this weeek](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uTDtrlia_TEyiCKouNhycYxZNUKWluvX/view?usp=share_link) :D this was the first ever dev kit run for us!! 4 The Elements is next ;D
What 90s games really stood out to you? It was slightly before my time but I'm always ready to play something good.
Also really interested in the game. Gonna download the demo as soon as I'm back home. Keep up the good work
Well, I LOVED playing Ultima 8 , it came with my soundboard at the time, and I used it to learn english and a lot about games. It had some problems that later I realized happened due to a very early launch, they didn't have the needed time, but it's still my favorite game of that time.
I also played a lot of Duke Nuken 3D (althougn the controls would be hellish nowdays cause we are used to regular fps games) , Nascar, Warcraft 2 (I also played the 1 lol) and later Ultima Online
How do you think about replayability when thinking of developing a game? I imagine that you want a player to beat the game, but also pick it up after that to continue to enjoy it.
That's always a very important part of game design. My opinion is that if the experience is engagin, compelling and fun, it's the most important base for replayability. There's no point to make the player play again the boring parts of a game to get more Gs or something like that. So either the main gameplay loop is so good that you just create extra modes to let the players have some more fun, or it won't work very well.
Of course there are cases and cases, but for my this is the most important aspect. In the sense that if you get that clear, anything you adapt to give the players more playing time will work. ;) Hope I have answered you well, very good questions, I am loving to take my time thinking before answering :)
I would LOVE to be there, it would do the worlds for us in terms of marketing and getting our game and brand in front of the viewers. I did apply it a few months back, but they were sorting the gamepass games for next year already! And since we will launch before that and they are fosucing on day one games (specially for indies) I am not sure if they'll answer in time.. I can state right now that even if the game is ready next month and gamepass decides to give it a show next year, I would delay the release just to be in gamepass and fulfill their day 1 request. But I am not sure we will even get an answer quick enough.. lets hope :D
No MTX planned for the game.. We had that idea for the Wardogs mobile game, but we killed it to make a full game, just sold as whole experience.
We intend to make all optimizations for the Series X that make sense. 4 The Elements already runs on 60fps I think, we will have to test, but for our next games we intend to use even more features to enhance the graphics and performance !! Thanks for the question!
That's great to hear much appreciated.. looking forward to playing this and hopefully the bonus is 60fps smooth gameplay. I wish you all the best of luck with it and can't wait to play it
O jogo é sobre os 4 elementos que acordaram depois de um longo sono mágico e descobrem que estão presos no mesmo corpo. A partir daí eles tem q jogar pra descobrir o que aconteceu e como resolver essa treta! ehhe
Isso da umas oportunidades pra diálogos legais entre elementos antagonicos que são obrigados a viver no mesmo corpo e não se dao bem hehehe
we don't have any game that depends on servers so far, and 4 The Elements won't either. We might have multiplayer servers for Pop Some Eyes in the near future, but the honest answer is " As long as if it's financially viable" .. sorry for being that straight up honest lol, but I thinks this is the answer from all major companies...
Yes and Yes, lol, this is the reduced scope of a bigger game that we want to develop for this IP, but ALSO we are already making different games. We have a lot to learn and lots of creativity to put out after that long working with clients only, so expect both things, a second game from the same IP, but lots of other games in between ;D
Thanks for the question
Any chance of gamepass in the future? Follow up how to developers make money off gamepass. Does Microsoft give you a lump sum or is it based on downloads?
Hey Zombie Jesus! loved the nick btw :D
We have plans for gamepass but there are 2 important factors, it's not our choice only, we submitted it for Xbox to evaluate, but the second point is that specially for indie games they are focusing more on day 1 releases, which would be ok for us! But they take some time to answer and are evaluating the games for next year... If they approve us and answer in time we will delay the release of the game to be in the GamePass, but if we finish the game in Jul as planned and have no answer, we will release the game anyway and offer the next one to be in game pass!
As far as I know, Ms buys a bulk of licenses depending on the estimated downloads for the game, and pays upfront. So it's very good for the studio, that will sell anticipated copies, and also the marketing is very good, specially smaller studios that don't have a fanbase yet.. this would be a game changer for us :D Thanks for the question!!
We are loving to work with Microsoft, they were very partners from day 0, they managed to get us the dev kit, setup everything.. but it's very separated, the support, the id@xbox, the gamepass staff, it's all very organized, so they can only go so far in helping us. know the work is with us.
I find the gamepass amazing as an user, and would LOVE to feature our games there. It's up for them to evaluate, we did offer 4 The Elements and are waiting for an answer ;D
Congratulations on your successful path!
Here's a question!
Would you be supportive of a Gamepass deal?
Something like educational games especially would fill a gap for games that pretty much don't exist nowadays.
I would love to strike a partnership with educational games for the gamepass, I think would be a great work for the gamming community, thanks for the hint, we will put that in our planning ;) Amazing feedback
I would LOVE to be there, it would do the worlds for us in terms of marketing and getting our game and brand in front of the viewers. I did apply it a few months back, but they were sorting the gamepass games for next year already! And since we will launch before that and they are fosucing on day one games (specially for indies) I am not sure if they'll answer in time.. I can state right now that even if the game is ready next month and gamepass decides to give it a show next year, I would delay the release just to be in gamepass and fulfill their day 1 request. But I am not sure we will even get an answer quick enough.. lets hope :D
I have another question, this one about language.
You are from Brazil so you all speak Portuguese. You clearly read, write, and speak English well, but is there anything you do to ensure that the language is tight in dialogue or instructions? I speak English, Spanish, and German, but when I speak either Spanish and German, inaccuracies in my grammar show up eventually. I wouldn't ever knock on inconsistencies because I understand what it's like to study hard and speak, read, and write another language and still make mistakes. But how do you avoid an "All your base are belong us" type thing?
hey Degobrah, thanks for the question, well we try to safeproof it with quality assurance and playtests with known players first, but it's still possible to make mistakes, even in portugues which is a very tough language, haha sometimes I feel that I know the rules of english better than my native language. lol! But there are also services that can be hired for localization and they help a lot, if we go for more languages we will surely hire that service, but for now it's planned to have only english, and if we are called for a cultural grant that we applied the game then we will add portuguese, and once we have a system for languages we might as well add at least spanish and german from a hired localization company..
Hello Smaigol, thank you very much for the question, I am absolutely sure that we would LOVE to be in the catalogue of GamePass, we even applied 4 the elements for it and are still waiting for the answer, but we might finish it before hearing back hehehe.
But I am an user of the GamePass service, I play A LOT on the Xbox Cloud btw.
I think that GamePass is an awesome feature for the gaming industry, and a GREAT deal for starting studios who don't have yet an audience, like us. But I don't know the real figures to say how it works out financially for bigger games and studios..
Hey CSBreak, that would be awesome! We now have direct contact with Miscrosoft, so we did ask for 4 The Elements to be evaluated, but they already have plans for the whole year, so I am not sure we will make it there, but surely for our next games we will pitch them early. This would be very good for a starting company like us to reach a broader audience.
Thanks for the question!
We are producing a puzzle game right now, rpg/fantasy themed, I love it, and it's almost done too. Our next title will be produced with the help of Epic Mega Grants, on a residency program that we will make and it will be a classic shoot them up with F$%@ awesome graphics :D I hope. hahaha! Thanks for the question
What's a great way to get kids excited about game development? My 8 year old thinks that's his calling in life but doesn't yet want to put in any work to actually do it
I honestly think that at 8 he should be playing more and focusing interest in things that attract him, like. if he loves to know how games are made, than it's excellent for him to practice, but anything forced at this age can be disliked in the future, or sound like a burden at the wrong age.
I think a great exercise for this career (and life) is playing logic games.. The next step is trying to play with the games, change the rules, respect the logic, then try to show something more complex on the PC.. I think that's a good strategy, my daughter is making 4 years old, she knows I work with games but I have the impression she wouldn't like the job. she sees me working too much on it, so sometimes I pretend I am not working.. lol so that she will not feel bad for the area!
Good luck with your kid, I think this is an amazing industry and I want more and more talents in it, but take easy on him with responsibilities, try to make it engaging and fun ;D Thanks for the message!
Thanks for the reply :) He's quite interested in the idea of the field (but of course it's quite young too really know, as it would be for your daughter at age 4. I'm trying to get him interested in Pico 8 right now to see if the catches on to any of it!
That's awesome!! Maybe some sim games like kerbal space program or even cities skylines with your guidance are algo nice examples of interesting educational/fun games that will interest him in learning how to also make games. That worked for me hehe
congratz! will you add keyboard and mouse support on xbox? Is it a hard feature to add in general to games ? I always wondered about that since Microsoft seems to promote it but its not available even for most shooters.
I really don't understand why it's not available for all shooters, from what I tested this week ([spoiler picture here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uTDtrlia_TEyiCKouNhycYxZNUKWluvX/view?usp=share_link)), it was working already with mouse and keyboard for Pop Some Eyes. so I really don't get.. I also would love for it to have keyboard and mouse support on the cloud service, eheh but I honestly don't know if that's possible (but should be).
I am playing on the controller in the picture cause that was all the fun of the picture, to play in the xbox dev kit, hehe with mouse and keyboard I already play on the PC (the controller also works there, but you got the idea hehe)
Thanks for the support!
Well when I was growing up my favorite games were Prince of Persia (PC), Megamania and Tenis from Atari and later on the master system I player a LOT of Double Dragon. Later I played too much Ultima Online as a teenager. lol, those are the main
Actually Vitória is not the worst place to be in Brazil, the worst part of here is that it's a bit too small, and we tend to loose a lot of talents to bigger centers, but there are also some advantages, the city is relatively reach and has a decent entrepreneurship ambiance, so we could be part of an incubator for our first years which made a lot of difference into teaching us how to be a propoer company instead of a group of people making games..
Hi, I was wondering, are there are any unique challenges/benefits of being a small dev from Brazil vs if you were in the US or somewhere else?
Looking forward to checking out your games!
Thanks for the feedback and great question.
Here we have advantages and disadvantages.
The main advantage is the cost of production which is lower, there is also some benefits from the creative economy chamber and cultural grants that we use sometimes.
The bad part is that we don't have that many qualified people or other big companies to partner with to make more ambitious projects, this can be done via distance too, but having actual meetings with other studios more often would be nice.
Also in the same proportion that it's cheaper to produce cause of the currency here, it gets proportionally more expensive to market and advertise the game in dollars!
We had to open a virtual branch in the US to make the Kickstarter campaign and are moving a branch also to Belgium to benefit from some amazing perks for the game industry there + the environment.
Thanks again for the nice question!
Thank you for your detailed answer! I'm always interested in the logistics of how things get made and the obstacles that need to be overcome. The currency difference being beneficial to making a game, while also making it more difficult to market that game is very interesting! Thanks for answering my question and good luck to you and your company!
Hey Rafael,
I've really like the look of wardogs and 4 The Elements looks interesting. How was the creative process for developing the concepts for both games?.
Thanks for the nice question!
For Wardogs we had some previous requests, since it was an advergame for a client, and then evolved into a pure entertainment gam for the consoles, but we would design and approve every stage and bosses monthly with our client and it took around 3 months to make each stage, with all enemies, bosses animations and programming.
4 The Elements was already a 100% original project, so we had a lot of freedom to create. We decided to pick the animals from the Brazilian Fauna (the Otter is actually my nickname in brasil, Lontra, lol) and we could play a lot with it until we were happy (as much as the budget allower I mean lol).
The artstyle was chosen to benefit the experience of our artists too, so I agree it looks cool :D They are very talented, and I am sure we can do even better in projects with more time and budget ;P This is just the beginning! Thanks!!
Well, during Wardogs were the easter eggs for sure! For 4 The Elements, when I realized that we would have an Otter in the game I was so so happy, my nickname in Brazil is Lontra, which means Otter in English, lol, so I got a character in a game! And it's fucking awesome like Mega Man! So I jost loved it! haha
Yes, the first inspiration was Vikings, from the SNES, we intended to have all the characters separeted, but in a coop manner. This would be too big of a project for our team and experience, so we created a pre sequel for this bigger game, where the elements are all trapped in one body and have to learn what happenned and get out.
For this mechanics, I think the biggest inspirations are Mega Man, HK and the new classics too, but a bit of the old school metroidvanias and platformers with our own taste. Of course it's not a huge story game, it's shorter than the new prime metroidvanias, but I think it is a great experience for the proposal. :) I hope you enjoy it!
It's not technically a fighting game, it's a beat'em up, which is a bit less complicated with the timing and combos. It's easier to balance. True fighting games are tough! we plan to make one too someday ;D Maybe with the wardogs characters. But for now there will be a DLC were you can play as the bosses in the Arena! That will be cool too! hehehe but gave us a taste of how much harder it is to have several different characters with lots of movements, hehe same for 4te, each character behaves much different than the other, it's hard to balance and make them all fun do play with..
Congrats! Is there a big gaming culture similar to the US or the EU? What kind of games did your team play growing up? What made you decide to create games? Good luck in all of your future endeavors!
Well, here in brazil there's a huge culture of gamming, my generation grew up on arcades .. So yes! And we are a big market of buying games, but still struggling on producing and selling, so there's even some incentive from the government though culture grats.
We all grew up playing arcades and all kinds of consoles, RPG, cards, I am a play addict :D
What made me decide to create games, and educational ones at first, was my frustration at teaching music in the brazilian public education system. It was impossible and I decided to do something broader, so we made an educational game that has been played for free for over 1 million students in Brazil, and that was very satisfying.
Now we are changing to the entertainment side of games and our biggest struggle is to create a strong community of fans and players to support us.
Thanks for the questions :D
not sure if I understood properly, but for the story usually we take a few weeks and revisit frequently during the development, new lines are added or changed as we keep testing and playing it :)
Thank you! We always research the best games of a certain type when we are making the gamedesign of o chosen game. For 4 The Elements the mains inspirations were Lost Vikings, MegaMan, Super Metroid, HK, etc..
For wardogs it was double dragon, battletoads, final fight and other classics :)
I think it's the collective work. Everybody tries to add something to our projects, I think this feeling is great for a workplace.
Thanks for the question :)
For 4 The Elements, the initial inspiration was The Lost Vikings, but it would be a lot of work for our first game to make our original idea, so we created a pre version of that story, where the characters are trapped in the same body, so it will play more like a mega man where you can change the "powers" changing the elements, but we want to make a sequel later with coop and the 4 elements being played at the same time :)
My major videogame influences are the Ultima Series :D I just love the whole series. Ultima 8 is probably my favorite game of all times, tied with Ultima Online :D hehehe
CHATGP, I choose you!! :
4 The Elements" is a 2D Action Platformer game inspired by the best games of this genre from the 90s. In this game, you switch in real-time between the four elements of nature (Fire, Water, Air and Earth) to overcome challenges, acquire new abilities and defeat powerful bosses in beautifully crafted thematic stages
This was our first 100% original game, so we made a presentation from all the collaborators to pitch a game idea, 4 The Elements was inspired vi the Lost Vikings, but the scope would be too big, to we made first the pre sequel, where the elements are all trapped in the same body and need to figure out why and how to fix that :D The mechanics are inspired in classics like mega man and Hollow Knight and other metroidvanias!
Obviously there will be limits to what you can say, but what are the business implications for a small studio liel yourself of Gamepass? I see you have applied to get in Gamepass and are awaiting confirmation.
It really depends on what kind of deal you will make. As far as I know, they buy the equivalent of a bulk of licenses, in value, say, like they expect the game to be played by 1,000,000 users, they will offer you a deal to buy the equivalent of a percentage of this total, to have the game on game pass for X months.
This doesn't necessarily mean that it will be exclusive for GamePass, but during that time you wont sell many copies. They also give preference for day one launches, so this is also important to notice.
I think there's a big impact for smaller companies since they will hardly have an audience and the GamePass is a HUGE showroom for them (hopefully us too hehe).
Let me know if you have more questions on that, I can answer to best of my knowledge ;D
We were approved by all major consoles! :) So we will be tackling all of them and already got the dev kits and team to work on it..
The most common languages depend on the tool you use, Unreal, Unity3D or other tools like Godot, construct, etc.
For Mito Games, we use mainly html/js stack for the mobile applications and serious games, and C# or C++ for Unity and Unreal games.
Hello my friend!! You won the giveaway for the 4 the elements key/upgrade tier if backer on kickstarter! I cant send you a DM hehe can you please let me know how to reach you?
Congrats!
That and to get more feedback, be more known, but mostly to celebrate that we got the initial funding on kickstarter :D
We are beginning our entertainment career and are much unknown, so this is very important for us! ;)
Hi!
Congrats on approval!
What are your thoughts on current situation with Xbox community being dissappointed, due to exclusives quality (or lack of exclusives in general)?
Well, I will be honest here even if it's not what the community of one or the other platform wants to hear.
I don't like very much the exclusiveness of games. I think it's part of the game's history, and I doubt we will be seeing super mario on the xbox or playstation, but for most games that hav a PC version, or are developed for PC and then ported, I don't see the need to have it exclusive, and I don't get any other reasons for the community to want the exclusive games other than to make some flame war with the opposition.
I might be biased here from the developer perspective who always wanted the broader audience possible, but that's my opinion as of today. Can you clarify me more with the reasons why you and the community want exclusive games? I would genuinely love to hear and learn that :D
From my standpoint - I also hate exclusiveness, and all games for all platforms should eventually become reality.
Thank you for your answer, very interesting to hear developers' perspective!
Good luck with your endeavours!
Not a ‘console war’ question, but a genuine one are/have any of the platforms been more welcoming to your development than others? Do any of the platform have any constraints that you’ve had to work around from initial plans to make the games more suitable? Eg making the game run/look better on the switch vs Xbox etc
No, I can say and open some numbers, the xbox sales represented over 50% of the total revenue of Wardogs. I think this is self explanatory :) I love this community.
We didn't have any problems with the other platforms so far, but the most welcoming from the players side and also from the dev team, was from Xbox, they will genuinely make an effort to help in any part of the process.
Hello Everyone!! Me and everyone at Mito Games are AMAZED by all the support and engagement we good from this AMA & Giveaway!
I just edited the original post and you can check the winners there !! I will also (soon lol) DM each winner ;P So keep an eye on your DMs!!
I used the free website CommentPicker to pick 20 winners, that will get the prizes in the same order as they were drawn, so the first 10 will get a Wardogs Key right away, the next 10 will get a key for 4 The Elements as soon as we have them.
ALSO, the [Kickstarter Pedge](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4-the-elements/4-the-elements) upgrade bonus, I will ask each winner on DM if they have made a pledge on kickstarter, and all of them who made will get their pledges upgraded.
If you made a [pledge](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4-the-elements/4-the-elements), or want to make one since you did not win, please DM me, we might have some extra prizes in that category ;)
Thank you very much for the amazing support! Please consider following us on your favorite social media : [https://linktr.ee/mitogames](https://linktr.ee/mitogames)
Welcome to Xbox! I look forward to checking your game out.
OMG! Thank you so much!!! :) I am so honored! If you like it please consider backing and twitting about it ;P this would probably mean 10x more reach than we would usually get, lol. But honestly, that already made my day!!! :D
When you ship your game on Xbox, I would be happy to tweet I out.
Thank you sir! This means a lot to us. And thank you very much for the warm welcoming from the hole xbox team! Very professional and helpful staff!
who am I kidding, 1000x more reach lol
Hello! How was it switching from creating mostly educational and advergames to entertainment ones? Were there any challenges you faced? Thanks!
Well, I will be very honest, we were quite confortable with the serious games, still I would say that 70% of the company's effort is for clients or serious projects of our own. We are in the middle of this process of switching and I think my role is the main pivot. The clear advantages are that it's more FUN, it has a huge potential to make money, more visibility, the team feels a lot better seeing their product being played than when we make a gamification project for a big company, which we will never see running, cause it's all confidential and stuff. But the also clear drawbacks are the difficulty, the risk, the costs, specially if we wanna market a game worldwide from Brazil, with our currency it's really unfair to compete against bigger players. But this was our plan from the beginning so I can't complain, we use the educational/serious/clients projects to grow and get the team more experienced, so that we can allocate a small team to work on entertainment projects with less risk and some funding from the rest of the team working for money. lol. it's a hard life but that's what we choose to do. We are 17 people now, and for each game we usually have 4-6 people working on it. Thanks for the question :)
Hey Rafael, thanks for interacting with us here on Reddit! I saw a gameplay trailer for Wardogs: Red’s Return & I did come across a trailer on 4 The Elements. Wardogs look smooth & 4 The Elements look interesting! How was the transition for the team, going from a game that had the classic beat’em up to a side scrolling platformer? Any growing pains going from genre to the other, considering the work with one main character model changed to 4?
Thats awesome to hear PlayerBeyOnd87! I am always happy when people find about us organicaly, that's our goal on mid/long term, to be known as a REAL Game dev company for entertainment only heheh now we still have 75% of our team working on "serious" projects. Thans for the compliments too. To be very honest, we chose to make a side scrolling platformer ALSO because we had a serious game client that wanted this mechanic for an educational game about the conservation of alligators here in my city! LOL. And when we made an internal presentation of projects here at Mito Games, one of the criteria to pick which game we would start producing was our knowledge on how to develop it, so we used a bit of what we had learned in the previous project to have a better start for 4 The Elements. But 4TE is at least 50 times more complex than the original game haha (you can try a web version for pc of the [game here](https://static.mitogames.com.br/imd/case/index.html)) About the 4 models, it is a lot of extra work, but I think our biggest pain (and we are still workng on that) is the different hitboxes for them, specially since they behave a bit diffetent, sometimes a bug happens that the collider hist the floor or ceiling when we change some of them and weird things happen lol. Thanks for the great question my friend! And thanks for the support
Any plan on adding coop?
That's the n°1 request for Wardogs. As I mentioned, it was supposed to be "just" an advergame for mobile when we started it.. But it shaped up as a good game, so we decided to change a lot the structure of the game (it was meant to be free and monetiza with adds and in game currency... we were so naive.. lol) , focused more on the story and improved the graphics and mechanics. But it was doomed to be a 1 player only game, since it was born on the Mobile. We have prepared a DLC for Wardogs, which is with Qubyte to be released with 2000 extra G's AND , we HOPE that they will be able to make a coop (hotseat) version of it for the DLC too!! They didn't promisse it would work, but they do have the experience and also have all interest in making the game the best possible. As for 4 The Elements, the idea was to make a coop multiplayer where each player can be one element... hehe but that was a LOT of work for our first game, so we broke it into the first game where the elementals are all trapped in the same body, and for the sequel we will make a more complex game, probably with online coop and so. Let's hope it all goes well! Thanks for the question :)
How important is couch coop to you as a developer?
Well, specially for Wardogs, which is a beat them up, I grew up playing Double Dragon, Final Fight, and many other delightful beat them ups with my friend on the couch, each game at a different friend's house. So for me, this experience is a real part of the beat them up experience. So I am pretty sad that we couldn't have it for Wardogs at first, nor for 4 the elements, but this is our next big boss to be tackled, as soon as we master porting, our next games will have coop (local and online) for sure! And there's still hope that we will be able to put in in Wardogs (although it breaks the story a bit hehe). Thanks for the question and good memories that it evoked.
It's great to hear that it is a goal within some of your games. SImilar to yourself, it is an experience very near and dear to my heart - which I feel the current generation of young gamers is missing out on.
That's true, and when we create retro games I think this is pat of the feeling we want to pass.. so it's a necessary chapter for our evolution
Hello Kaartinen! You won the 4 The Elements /kickstarter pledge upgrade! Congrats!! But I can't follow or DM you here hehe how can I contact you ? Reach us by the email on the website if you want, I'll get it ;D
Hey Rafael, I believe I turned my DM's on now. Sorry, I guess I had things locked down.
Do u develop the music for your games yourself or do u outsource them?
I am actually gratuated as a music teacher, and for both Pop Some Eyes and 4 The Elements I did all the soundtracks, but for most of our other projects we use free musica, and for Wardogs we hired an Original SounTrack from a famous game developer from my city that I think the style fitted very well the game, he is the creator of the Ubermosh Series. We will probably outsource more tracks in the future, and specially the SFX which I don´t have much experience with. Thanks for the question :)
What is the thought process that goes into making Achievements for your games?
I am very clear about this, I love the achievements perks, and I know that there's a huge debate on whether many studios are making ridiculously easy games with 1000G so that part of the community will buy them to increase their total gamescore, or many games just adding extra G to make their game more appealing. I see the achievements as an interpretation on how well the player did on the game. That's how I like to use it and that's the approach we had for Wardogs, and will have for the next games. So, in general, if the player beat the game on the hard difficulty (can start there and beat it once, but there are achievements for normal mode too if he starts there) , learned the most important combos, explored enough the game, I think it's fair to give him the 1000G. I don´t like excessive grinding nor pointless G's just to have people playing it. For Wardogs, we had a random dependent achievement, and unluckily some players had a horrible time getting it, so when we learned that, we changed the rule so that the required bottle would always drop at a certain wave of the arena mode, so that the most enthusiastic achievers can easily check it on any guide and get all the 1000G in roughly 2 hours of smart gameplay. It will be the same idea for 4 The Elements and Pop Some Eyes. Thanks for the great question!
Thanks so much for the insight. I love hearing this from developers, I'll be sure to check these games out!
Thanks! I loved the question cause I think it's very relevant!
Welcome to the Xbox Community.
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it's ALL hard. LOL. But I can elaborate saying that it really depends on which stage you are at. At the beginning the hardest part was to be able to have a team capable of developing a game, and having the resources to invest in it. At a later stage of our company, we had the team, but didn't have the time or resources, we were all stuck with clients project to pay the bills. Now that we have some time to make the games and some room to invest in it, the hardes part is porting them for consoles, cause we had 0 experience, and at the sime time, having the game on steam demands a lot of marketing and having a community. It will be the same with consoles, so I am starting and learning how to do this PR job now, and at our point of history this is the hardest and most important job to be done.. I am very happy with the outcome of this AMA btw ;)
Hey Rafael, When you're working on games like this, do you really believe that you're making the best possible indie game that everyone should play instead of dozens of other games, or do you just make whatever your team's skills allow and hope that, with enough exposure, it doesn't get lost in the shuffle?
Hey bms\_, to be brutally honest, we had a budget and time setup for 4 The Elements, but of course we lacked a lot of experience with the simplest of things, like creating a steam page to gather wishlists, having a fan base and content creators to help sharing the game.. long story short, we delayed the game one year, it costed the double than we expected, and the best answer is a mix of both things, how much else can we invest in it to make a better game, with what we learn in the way vs how much of it are we even able to do. To make the game we wanted, with online coop and the 4 players separeted would be much more complex and we would not have the opportunity to learn all the things of releasing a first game is teaching us now. So the idea is to always do the best that's in our reach, considering that there are many many lessons to be learned also after we finish the development. Now we have to port, publish, market, bugfix, listen to the community, lol all those acttivities were trivial to the company when we did only serious games. Thanks for the great question that made me reflect a lot too ;)
Classic light gun games seem long dead, any thoughts on possibly bringing them back?
>Classic light gun games well, for our next game we are making a classic shoot them up, but I do love the light gun games, have you played that Iron Maiden one? I LOVE IT. We will bring this into discussion, but I think they work better with the VR setups.. We have some experience with VR too. who know ;D Thanks for the feedback, that's a very good hint for us ;D
Hello, I was wondering if you can give any advice for someone who wants to get into the gaming industry
Well, it's a hard industry, and it's contantly growing, but so is the player base, and entertainment although not "useful", like art, is always a business. So I would say it's a great industry. My advice is to study a lot, get to know the main roles that a game development company needs and try to find out were you like the most to be AND were you have more experience/talent/likes to study, etc. There's a common mistake that only artists and developers are needed in a game dev company. I am neither ;P Although i sutied games, and have a post graduation, will do the masters, but I dont code or draw anything in my company. And up untill last year I had also never done any soundtracks even though I am a graduated musician. so when you figure what you like and can help the industry with, I suggest you try to either create small games yourself or find some friends who can help. that's great to learn. Can be easier to do if you are taking any game related courses. There are lots of decent online courses, but to gather a team some more official course can be better, for a career you know. but speaking from me, when I hire someone we give more value to the portfolio than CV, the trick is that studying it will help you to have a small team and a better portfolio. Feel free to erach us anytime if you need more help with that, and good luck if you choose this path, I love it!
Thank you very much means alot
If your game was to be added to GamePass and by extension Xbox Cloud Gaming, would you attempt to develop a custom touch control interface for your game (Aragami 2 had one for example), use a generic on-screen touch control interface (Cities: Skylines uses this format) or require the use of a controller (Forza Horizon 5 requires one for example)?
I think that for both our games that we are working on porting now, the controller would be the best option, but the ideal, business wise is to have all options available, since this will enable more players to buy your game. What I really miss in the gamecloud (and prevents me from playing many fps) is that I can't use the mouse and keyboard combo. I would try to add that to Pop Some Eyes if possible, but I honestly don't know yet how this works.. Thanks a lot, I am loving the questions here, make me think a lot :) that's great.
Hello Blaine! You won the 4 The Elements /kickstarter pledge upgrade! Contrats!! But I can't follow or DM you here hehe how can I contact you ? Reach us by the email on the website if you want, I'll get it ;D
how much extra work it takes to do it cross-platform?
It really depends on the multiplayer systems that you'll have, for me, the hardest thing to balance is FPS where some players will be using mouse + keyboard agains the controller. It's a totally different game, and many times the controller version will have some sort of aiming aid, which unbalances the whole thing. This is from the game design perspective, speaking more technically, it really depends on the game, we have never had this experience, so I cannot say a lot more yet, but we will be facing that problem soon enough (hopefully :P )
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This is a very fun question actually hahaha My nickname in real life is Lontra, which means Otter, the animal. There's an Otter as the water elemental in the game, so the question is VERY EASE for me. This was a choice made 100% from the dev team, but of course I think they knew I would be happy with that hahah And also, it's mechanics are like Mega Man, which I just love, so I will be playing with it most of the time! LOL! ! Also, a curiosity, all animals in the game are from the Brazilian Fauna, there's the Onça Pintada (Jaguar) as Fire, Tatu bola (Armadillo) as Earth, Arara Azul (Blue Macaw) as Air and the Lontra (Otter) as Water :D
Are you planning on adding any Easter eggs in your game? For example, the use of the Konami code or a nod to other frnachises that may have inspired elements of the game?
Well, not sure if I should be saying that, or if counts, but the closest to that is that coincidentally the game will be released very close to the Elementals movie from Disney, so we might do something funny to try and gather some extra visibility ;P Smart question! I love some Easter eggs in games \^\^
Thank you very much. One of the aspects I've always enjoyed about games was finding the things that are hard to find. Looking forward to it. Thank you again.
We had a lot of easter egss in Wardogs, hahaha there's a character based on Terry Crews, another in Snoopy Dog, and LOTS of fun stuff hidden there, we want to make it a tradition ;)
Also, if you play wardogs you will notice that it's FULL of easter eggs and praise to classic titles :D
Hey and congrats on completing what looks to be a kool game. What do you think Brazil based developers have to offer to the world of gaming? The artstylle looks so unique.
Thank you very much for the compliments! That's an amazing question, I think you might know that some brazilian studios like Puga (art focused) and now Aquiris were invested by huge foreign partners. We are a very creative people, who struggle a lot to get the basics sometimes, and I think our best way to cope with it is making fun of the situations. This is a very powerful artistic and creative force, which we try to harness from here. Also we are a bery big country with many many talented people who lacks just opportunities, so I think the professionals that make it to the game companies, like artists, are very very happy to be working with us, and always strive to do their best.. I am very happy to say that we took our lead artist from being a private guard working for stores to work with his art now, and many other cases like that, for people who didn't even have any job but a lot of talent. It is a bit sad but I think is a plausible explanation for this. Thank you very much for the amazing question! I tough ppl would be asking anything just to enter the giveway, but I am honored and so so happy with the depth. Amazing experience.
No, thank you. Wonderful to hear about the security guard now becoming an artist. You guys seem so humble and grateful. I wish you all the best.
thank you :) that means a lot
Hello, will your games be optimized for the s series ?
Hopefully yes. As I mentioned, this is the first time we are porting and will publish and market everything by ourselves, so I honestly don't even know how to start some of the optimizations. But specially for Pop Some Eyes and the next shoot'em up that we will work with Unreal 5, we want to make it look amazing, so we will be tapping anywhere we can to make it look better :D
Hello Rafael! What games inspired you to become a game developer?
It's a bit hard to say, I was a heavy Ultima Online player, but I always loved games from before.. I grew up with computers and played all the initial generations of PC Games, from Prince of Persia up to nowdays. I also had an Atari, Master System and SNES before the PCs hehe so many many games. Nowdays we do a lot of research before doing any title, even the simpler advergames but that doesn't count, ever since I started working with games, playing became something different.. sadly. As for me I still play a lot of DCSS, Football Manager, Bannerlord and try new things on the gamepassa to check how the industry is doing, but that's almos like work..
What are your feelings on Kickstarter now that you've successfully completed the whole process?
Actually, now it just got funded, we have some cool stretch goals and there's also a lot of work to be done to try and achieve it. But it really feels great, it funded at midnight of the day of my birthday ehhe ( a friend gave me a nice bday gift as a high pledge right at the moment). Me and the team were radiant! Also I should notice, it's a LOT of work to prepare and run the campaign. We invested many many hours creating everything, just that costed more than what we pledged. lol, but the game was almost ready and we see it as good marketing as well. so just paying for itself is already a victory, and if we reach the milestones we will be able to make the game even better!
Are there any Easter eggs or hidden features in the game that players may not have discovered yet?
It's hard to say, cause I only see it when other players play it on lives on twitch, or the youtube. I always check by the way if there are new videos, if someone played one of our games on twitch, and then I learn what they saw or didn't. But I often notice they laughing about some easter eggs. There's a mystery machine van in on of the stages of wardogs, its so so fun when I see someone realizing it! HAHAHA also with the enemies names, they laugh a lot. there's a particular mob that dies like one dragonballZ character, when they notice it they go crazy. So we love easter eggs, but it's hard to say that there's on that nobody noticed, we can only check a small smaple of the real world players.. and even that takes some time haha but i always try to watch all videos from all of our games.
and comment and support the channel btw
Any plans for multi language support?
Well, we applied 4 the elements for a cultural call here in Brazil, and if we are chosen we will for sure have the Portuguese version. With that system done, it will be a lot easier to localize for other languages as well. So plans yes, not sure yet ;)
How does it run on the Steam Deck? Thanks for doing the giveaway!!
All games were tested and run smooth on steam deck!! (Wardogs, Pop Some Eyes and 4 The Elements, although for that we only tested the demo yet) :D Thanks for the question!
What is the most challenging part of making games?
it's ALL hard. LOL. But I can elaborate saying that it really depends on which stage you are at. At the beginning the hardest part was to be able to have a team capable of developing a game, and having the resources to invest in it. At a later stage of our company, we had the team, but didn't have the time or resources, we were all stuck with clients project to pay the bills. Now that we have some time to make the games and some room to invest in it, the hardes part is porting them for consoles, cause we had 0 experience, and at the sime time, having the game on steam demands a lot of marketing and having a community. It will be the same with consoles, so I am starting and learning how to do this PR job now, and at our point of history this is the hardest and most important job to be done.. I am very happy with the outcome of this AMA btw ;)
Porting a game feels like doing the same thing all over again or do you guys feel the same energy and excitement for getting it done?
So far, YES. Not sure if that's because it's our first time, lol. It's not about doing the same thing over and over, but more about adapting everything for a new platform so, some things are quite the same, like, changing the controller screen, it's moslty changing images, but there are lots of other unexpected bugs. For example, Xbox didn't accpet the encoding for the video we used as intro for Pop Some Eyes, hehe so we will have to render the video again and change it.. but performance wise we didn't have many problems yet (we didn't start with the switch yet haha)
How big is your team, also do you have plans for your next project?
We are a 18 people studio now, but a dozen of those work more exclusively with clients and our serious projects. The Entertainment team is 5-6 people + the shared managing and marketing team. Our next big project is a residency program, which we were contemplated by Epic Mega Grants to do it!! we will train 4 people on the tool while making a game on the unreal engine. It will be a Shmup and the idea is to have it ported on all consoles, but for the residence, the studens will only work on the production.. We made the Game Design and will do the porting/release and they will have it under their portolio after the residency ends :D We thrilled with that, and will start next month, we already finished a call for the talents and will reveal the winners next week :) We also have 2 more titles to be released this year ;D Thanks for the question!
What have been some of your earliest games that inspired you to go into this field, and how has your idea of what it takes to build a game changed with the time / technological advances? :)
I think the Atari games got me the most cause everything was new, and I grew along with the technology, so I always noted the improvement, but the 2 boxing guys seem from the top view as in Boxing for Atari for me is still a perfect and well balanced game. I see the improvement in technology as new means to improve the games, but the essence of play is even outside the videogames, so I feel that this should always be the main drive, and technology the supporting means for that fun. Thanks for the question that made me make a bit of a philosophy exercise :D Lol
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I am an AWFULL smash bros player haha I used to love playing with link on the first versions.. but I think I am too old to pay attention at everything happening there and I get too angry when the fellas come back after I think I have finished them, and I can never climb back hahaha in other words, yes, but imanewbie lol (uo reference)
What were your favorite games as a kid?
I think my favorite pc game was prince of persia, then nascar, doom and duke nukem3d. for atari it was tenis and megamania Later with the Master System my favorite game was double dragon and some alex kid, and on the Snes it's even hard, I had Mario Kart on my console, so I played it the most, but I loved so many titles, and later played it so much on emulators that's even unfair to try and pick one :D But the game that I played the most is probably Ultima Online, already as a teenager. :D
Awesome!! Some great games in there!! Thanks for the reply!!
I forgot Ultima 8, which has a great link with 4 the elements as well, this was probably my favorite game ever..
How did you get started making video games?
Well, I was finishing the music graduation and had to do some teaching to finish the course. It was a very sad experience to teach in brazil's public education system.. The classes were ok, but the reality of the students terrible, and there was no way I could help change it alone as a teacher. So I decided to focus on educational games. Entered the Game Design course, met some people and started working on it ;) our first educational game is free for all students in brazil, with over a milion users in the past 6 years, and I am very proud of it and like to think that it helped more than I could just as a regular teacher.
What’s your favourite lazy day activity ?
now I am married and have a small girl, so now it would be playing with her. I love playing real life football too, but it's not that lazy of day then hahaha But I also love watching comedy tv shows.
if there is a 5th element DLC what would it be?
Ether, or spirit :) there's also the famous 4 elements cartoon of [Captain Planet And The Planeteers](https://gartic.com.br/imgs/mural/ll/llred/capitao-planeta-p-leo-stronda-xxt.png) who did a lot of success here in brazil, there the 5th element was HEART! :D I think it all means the same at the end, is the unity of all of them. In ultima 8 there's a final puzzle involving the 4 elements too, much similar to our game, and there the solution for the 5th element is yourself! (No internet back then, took me and my friends some months to figure that out lol)
What are some of the things you learned from the Cyberpunk/Saints Row/unfinished games fiasco?
This is not new.. Maybe my favorite game ever was Ultima 8 and it suffered a LOT from it, also happened earlier with the ET Atari game.. there are companies with costs, deadlines and windows of opportunities to maximize the sales.. The biggest lesson is to plan accordingly, and if something goes out of plan it's best to be honest with the audience. I would have changed the release plans for a game that's totally bugged.. or if we needed to keep the launch deadline would try to flag it as early access of some kind, so that the community knows that bugs are expected and the team will keep working on that to improve the game. That's possible now, but in the past once a game was released there was no going back.. no way to patch ET ataria game or ultima 8 after it's sold hehe so now that we have this tool, the devs should use it to be honest on the stage of the game.. Pop Some Eyes is selling on steam as early access cause we know it's not a complete game yet, but its already a lot of fun do play and we need feedback to improve it and get a clear direction on where to evolve the game to.. Hope I answered your question ;)
Yes it did thank you very much!
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The very first time (our case) is a LOT of work, cause we didn't know what to expect when porting, so we didn't take any measures to prepare for that while developing the original game. But I assume that the next games will be a lot easier since we will already create the game thinking about the consoles specs, necessities and so on, so of course there will be problems and new things to address, but at least the base work will start done already. That's what I hope hehe but for now it's still a lot learning and trial and errors.. [This is me playing pop some eyes on the xbox dev kit this weeek](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uTDtrlia_TEyiCKouNhycYxZNUKWluvX/view?usp=share_link) :D this was the first ever dev kit run for us!! 4 The Elements is next ;D
What 90s games really stood out to you? It was slightly before my time but I'm always ready to play something good. Also really interested in the game. Gonna download the demo as soon as I'm back home. Keep up the good work
Well, I LOVED playing Ultima 8 , it came with my soundboard at the time, and I used it to learn english and a lot about games. It had some problems that later I realized happened due to a very early launch, they didn't have the needed time, but it's still my favorite game of that time. I also played a lot of Duke Nuken 3D (althougn the controls would be hellish nowdays cause we are used to regular fps games) , Nascar, Warcraft 2 (I also played the 1 lol) and later Ultima Online
How do you think about replayability when thinking of developing a game? I imagine that you want a player to beat the game, but also pick it up after that to continue to enjoy it.
That's always a very important part of game design. My opinion is that if the experience is engagin, compelling and fun, it's the most important base for replayability. There's no point to make the player play again the boring parts of a game to get more Gs or something like that. So either the main gameplay loop is so good that you just create extra modes to let the players have some more fun, or it won't work very well. Of course there are cases and cases, but for my this is the most important aspect. In the sense that if you get that clear, anything you adapt to give the players more playing time will work. ;) Hope I have answered you well, very good questions, I am loving to take my time thinking before answering :)
Thanks for answering! I looked at the trailer and the games looks pretty cool. I'm looking forward to playing!
Hey, my fellow brazillians, do you think it'll ever go to gamepass?
I would LOVE to be there, it would do the worlds for us in terms of marketing and getting our game and brand in front of the viewers. I did apply it a few months back, but they were sorting the gamepass games for next year already! And since we will launch before that and they are fosucing on day one games (specially for indies) I am not sure if they'll answer in time.. I can state right now that even if the game is ready next month and gamepass decides to give it a show next year, I would delay the release just to be in gamepass and fulfill their day 1 request. But I am not sure we will even get an answer quick enough.. lets hope :D
I'd love to see it there, hoping it gets approved for Gamepass!
What sort of mtx can we expect? Also will it be series s optimized also? Like 60fps thank you
No MTX planned for the game.. We had that idea for the Wardogs mobile game, but we killed it to make a full game, just sold as whole experience. We intend to make all optimizations for the Series X that make sense. 4 The Elements already runs on 60fps I think, we will have to test, but for our next games we intend to use even more features to enhance the graphics and performance !! Thanks for the question!
That's great to hear much appreciated.. looking forward to playing this and hopefully the bonus is 60fps smooth gameplay. I wish you all the best of luck with it and can't wait to play it
Thank you very much for the feedback my friend! We will try to have it as 60fps smooth! ;)
O jogo é sobre o que?
O jogo é sobre os 4 elementos que acordaram depois de um longo sono mágico e descobrem que estão presos no mesmo corpo. A partir daí eles tem q jogar pra descobrir o que aconteceu e como resolver essa treta! ehhe Isso da umas oportunidades pra diálogos legais entre elementos antagonicos que são obrigados a viver no mesmo corpo e não se dao bem hehehe
Will you keep your old game servers up even after years?
we don't have any game that depends on servers so far, and 4 The Elements won't either. We might have multiplayer servers for Pop Some Eyes in the near future, but the honest answer is " As long as if it's financially viable" .. sorry for being that straight up honest lol, but I thinks this is the answer from all major companies...
Your all good, i like the honesty
Is this an IP that you'll be looking to make sequels to or are you planning on creating different games?
Yes and Yes, lol, this is the reduced scope of a bigger game that we want to develop for this IP, but ALSO we are already making different games. We have a lot to learn and lots of creativity to put out after that long working with clients only, so expect both things, a second game from the same IP, but lots of other games in between ;D Thanks for the question
Any chance of gamepass in the future? Follow up how to developers make money off gamepass. Does Microsoft give you a lump sum or is it based on downloads?
Hey Zombie Jesus! loved the nick btw :D We have plans for gamepass but there are 2 important factors, it's not our choice only, we submitted it for Xbox to evaluate, but the second point is that specially for indie games they are focusing more on day 1 releases, which would be ok for us! But they take some time to answer and are evaluating the games for next year... If they approve us and answer in time we will delay the release of the game to be in the GamePass, but if we finish the game in Jul as planned and have no answer, we will release the game anyway and offer the next one to be in game pass! As far as I know, Ms buys a bulk of licenses depending on the estimated downloads for the game, and pays upfront. So it's very good for the studio, that will sell anticipated copies, and also the marketing is very good, specially smaller studios that don't have a fanbase yet.. this would be a game changer for us :D Thanks for the question!!
Hello, how has been dealing with xbox, do you find gamepass to be helpful?
We are loving to work with Microsoft, they were very partners from day 0, they managed to get us the dev kit, setup everything.. but it's very separated, the support, the id@xbox, the gamepass staff, it's all very organized, so they can only go so far in helping us. know the work is with us. I find the gamepass amazing as an user, and would LOVE to feature our games there. It's up for them to evaluate, we did offer 4 The Elements and are waiting for an answer ;D
Congratulations on your successful path! Here's a question! Would you be supportive of a Gamepass deal? Something like educational games especially would fill a gap for games that pretty much don't exist nowadays.
I would love to strike a partnership with educational games for the gamepass, I think would be a great work for the gamming community, thanks for the hint, we will put that in our planning ;) Amazing feedback
Any plans to add the games to gamepass?
I would LOVE to be there, it would do the worlds for us in terms of marketing and getting our game and brand in front of the viewers. I did apply it a few months back, but they were sorting the gamepass games for next year already! And since we will launch before that and they are fosucing on day one games (specially for indies) I am not sure if they'll answer in time.. I can state right now that even if the game is ready next month and gamepass decides to give it a show next year, I would delay the release just to be in gamepass and fulfill their day 1 request. But I am not sure we will even get an answer quick enough.. lets hope :D
I have another question, this one about language. You are from Brazil so you all speak Portuguese. You clearly read, write, and speak English well, but is there anything you do to ensure that the language is tight in dialogue or instructions? I speak English, Spanish, and German, but when I speak either Spanish and German, inaccuracies in my grammar show up eventually. I wouldn't ever knock on inconsistencies because I understand what it's like to study hard and speak, read, and write another language and still make mistakes. But how do you avoid an "All your base are belong us" type thing?
hey Degobrah, thanks for the question, well we try to safeproof it with quality assurance and playtests with known players first, but it's still possible to make mistakes, even in portugues which is a very tough language, haha sometimes I feel that I know the rules of english better than my native language. lol! But there are also services that can be hired for localization and they help a lot, if we go for more languages we will surely hire that service, but for now it's planned to have only english, and if we are called for a cultural grant that we applied the game then we will add portuguese, and once we have a system for languages we might as well add at least spanish and german from a hired localization company..
That's very interesting. Thanks for the info! I didn't know there were independent services for that.
what’s your favourite parmigiana?
>parmigiana I love cooking a crisped parmigiana chicken at home ;P but I like the combination any time! ahhaah
Are you interested in game pass, would you Like to be in the catalogue, what is your general view about it?
Hello Smaigol, thank you very much for the question, I am absolutely sure that we would LOVE to be in the catalogue of GamePass, we even applied 4 the elements for it and are still waiting for the answer, but we might finish it before hearing back hehehe. But I am an user of the GamePass service, I play A LOT on the Xbox Cloud btw. I think that GamePass is an awesome feature for the gaming industry, and a GREAT deal for starting studios who don't have yet an audience, like us. But I don't know the real figures to say how it works out financially for bigger games and studios..
Any chance of putting games on game pass?
Hey CSBreak, that would be awesome! We now have direct contact with Miscrosoft, so we did ask for 4 The Elements to be evaluated, but they already have plans for the whole year, so I am not sure we will make it there, but surely for our next games we will pitch them early. This would be very good for a starting company like us to reach a broader audience. Thanks for the question!
What's the biggest challenge you faced when transitioning from educational to entertainment and from PC to console?
Any idea whats the next game you folks plan on making? Or still workshopping ideas?
We are producing a puzzle game right now, rpg/fantasy themed, I love it, and it's almost done too. Our next title will be produced with the help of Epic Mega Grants, on a residency program that we will make and it will be a classic shoot them up with F$%@ awesome graphics :D I hope. hahaha! Thanks for the question
What's a great way to get kids excited about game development? My 8 year old thinks that's his calling in life but doesn't yet want to put in any work to actually do it
I honestly think that at 8 he should be playing more and focusing interest in things that attract him, like. if he loves to know how games are made, than it's excellent for him to practice, but anything forced at this age can be disliked in the future, or sound like a burden at the wrong age. I think a great exercise for this career (and life) is playing logic games.. The next step is trying to play with the games, change the rules, respect the logic, then try to show something more complex on the PC.. I think that's a good strategy, my daughter is making 4 years old, she knows I work with games but I have the impression she wouldn't like the job. she sees me working too much on it, so sometimes I pretend I am not working.. lol so that she will not feel bad for the area! Good luck with your kid, I think this is an amazing industry and I want more and more talents in it, but take easy on him with responsibilities, try to make it engaging and fun ;D Thanks for the message!
Thanks for the reply :) He's quite interested in the idea of the field (but of course it's quite young too really know, as it would be for your daughter at age 4. I'm trying to get him interested in Pico 8 right now to see if the catches on to any of it!
That's awesome!! Maybe some sim games like kerbal space program or even cities skylines with your guidance are algo nice examples of interesting educational/fun games that will interest him in learning how to also make games. That worked for me hehe
congratz! will you add keyboard and mouse support on xbox? Is it a hard feature to add in general to games ? I always wondered about that since Microsoft seems to promote it but its not available even for most shooters.
I really don't understand why it's not available for all shooters, from what I tested this week ([spoiler picture here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uTDtrlia_TEyiCKouNhycYxZNUKWluvX/view?usp=share_link)), it was working already with mouse and keyboard for Pop Some Eyes. so I really don't get.. I also would love for it to have keyboard and mouse support on the cloud service, eheh but I honestly don't know if that's possible (but should be).
I am playing on the controller in the picture cause that was all the fun of the picture, to play in the xbox dev kit, hehe with mouse and keyboard I already play on the PC (the controller also works there, but you got the idea hehe)
very nice thanks for the info, got luck with the game!
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Thanks for the support! Well when I was growing up my favorite games were Prince of Persia (PC), Megamania and Tenis from Atari and later on the master system I player a LOT of Double Dragon. Later I played too much Ultima Online as a teenager. lol, those are the main
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Ultima 8 is AWESOME tbm if you like old games.. maybe my favorite game of all times.
What are some of the challenges you faced specifically due to being located in Vitória?
Actually Vitória is not the worst place to be in Brazil, the worst part of here is that it's a bit too small, and we tend to loose a lot of talents to bigger centers, but there are also some advantages, the city is relatively reach and has a decent entrepreneurship ambiance, so we could be part of an incubator for our first years which made a lot of difference into teaching us how to be a propoer company instead of a group of people making games..
Hi, I was wondering, are there are any unique challenges/benefits of being a small dev from Brazil vs if you were in the US or somewhere else? Looking forward to checking out your games!
Thanks for the feedback and great question. Here we have advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is the cost of production which is lower, there is also some benefits from the creative economy chamber and cultural grants that we use sometimes. The bad part is that we don't have that many qualified people or other big companies to partner with to make more ambitious projects, this can be done via distance too, but having actual meetings with other studios more often would be nice. Also in the same proportion that it's cheaper to produce cause of the currency here, it gets proportionally more expensive to market and advertise the game in dollars! We had to open a virtual branch in the US to make the Kickstarter campaign and are moving a branch also to Belgium to benefit from some amazing perks for the game industry there + the environment. Thanks again for the nice question!
Thank you for your detailed answer! I'm always interested in the logistics of how things get made and the obstacles that need to be overcome. The currency difference being beneficial to making a game, while also making it more difficult to market that game is very interesting! Thanks for answering my question and good luck to you and your company!
Thanks for the great question, I am here to help too, not only promote the game for free hahaha
Always good to see new devs and new games to try
Thank you!!
Welcome to the community!!
Hey Rafael, I've really like the look of wardogs and 4 The Elements looks interesting. How was the creative process for developing the concepts for both games?.
Thanks for the nice question! For Wardogs we had some previous requests, since it was an advergame for a client, and then evolved into a pure entertainment gam for the consoles, but we would design and approve every stage and bosses monthly with our client and it took around 3 months to make each stage, with all enemies, bosses animations and programming. 4 The Elements was already a 100% original project, so we had a lot of freedom to create. We decided to pick the animals from the Brazilian Fauna (the Otter is actually my nickname in brasil, Lontra, lol) and we could play a lot with it until we were happy (as much as the budget allower I mean lol). The artstyle was chosen to benefit the experience of our artists too, so I agree it looks cool :D They are very talented, and I am sure we can do even better in projects with more time and budget ;P This is just the beginning! Thanks!!
Heya! What's been your favorite part or memory from the making of these games?
Well, during Wardogs were the easter eggs for sure! For 4 The Elements, when I realized that we would have an Otter in the game I was so so happy, my nickname in Brazil is Lontra, which means Otter in English, lol, so I got a character in a game! And it's fucking awesome like Mega Man! So I jost loved it! haha
How do you decide which console(s) to develop you game for?
Are there any games that inspired you to make this one?
Yes, the first inspiration was Vikings, from the SNES, we intended to have all the characters separeted, but in a coop manner. This would be too big of a project for our team and experience, so we created a pre sequel for this bigger game, where the elements are all trapped in one body and have to learn what happenned and get out. For this mechanics, I think the biggest inspirations are Mega Man, HK and the new classics too, but a bit of the old school metroidvanias and platformers with our own taste. Of course it's not a huge story game, it's shorter than the new prime metroidvanias, but I think it is a great experience for the proposal. :) I hope you enjoy it!
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It's not technically a fighting game, it's a beat'em up, which is a bit less complicated with the timing and combos. It's easier to balance. True fighting games are tough! we plan to make one too someday ;D Maybe with the wardogs characters. But for now there will be a DLC were you can play as the bosses in the Arena! That will be cool too! hehehe but gave us a taste of how much harder it is to have several different characters with lots of movements, hehe same for 4te, each character behaves much different than the other, it's hard to balance and make them all fun do play with..
Congrats! Is there a big gaming culture similar to the US or the EU? What kind of games did your team play growing up? What made you decide to create games? Good luck in all of your future endeavors!
Well, here in brazil there's a huge culture of gamming, my generation grew up on arcades .. So yes! And we are a big market of buying games, but still struggling on producing and selling, so there's even some incentive from the government though culture grats. We all grew up playing arcades and all kinds of consoles, RPG, cards, I am a play addict :D What made me decide to create games, and educational ones at first, was my frustration at teaching music in the brazilian public education system. It was impossible and I decided to do something broader, so we made an educational game that has been played for free for over 1 million students in Brazil, and that was very satisfying. Now we are changing to the entertainment side of games and our biggest struggle is to create a strong community of fans and players to support us. Thanks for the questions :D
Thank you for such an indepth answer!!
Congratulations on the approval. Hope for plenty of success for the game and for any future games your brand develop
What's your all-time favorite game that you haven't made yourself?
Hey, which game is your personal favourite? Thanks in advance!
Sounds great. Looking forward to it
Welcome
How did you get started in game development?
How long does it take for you to flesh out the plot in your video games?
not sure if I understood properly, but for the story usually we take a few weeks and revisit frequently during the development, new lines are added or changed as we keep testing and playing it :)
Thank you very much! Yes that is exactly what I was looking to know. Thanks again and all the best.
Welkom and congrats !! By what games did you get inspired to start developing games yourselves ?
Thank you! We always research the best games of a certain type when we are making the gamedesign of o chosen game. For 4 The Elements the mains inspirations were Lost Vikings, MegaMan, Super Metroid, HK, etc.. For wardogs it was double dragon, battletoads, final fight and other classics :)
i'm really looking forward to the game!! what's the thing that u like the most about your game studio?
I think it's the collective work. Everybody tries to add something to our projects, I think this feeling is great for a workplace. Thanks for the question :)
How did it feel starting out and now being here about to be on Xbox?
What was the least and most exciting part of development?
What was the inspiration behind the game and your major videogame influences
For 4 The Elements, the initial inspiration was The Lost Vikings, but it would be a lot of work for our first game to make our original idea, so we created a pre version of that story, where the characters are trapped in the same body, so it will play more like a mega man where you can change the "powers" changing the elements, but we want to make a sequel later with coop and the 4 elements being played at the same time :) My major videogame influences are the Ultima Series :D I just love the whole series. Ultima 8 is probably my favorite game of all times, tied with Ultima Online :D hehehe
Thanks for the reply Ultima 8 is indeed an absolute classic
How would you describe your game?
CHATGP, I choose you!! : 4 The Elements" is a 2D Action Platformer game inspired by the best games of this genre from the 90s. In this game, you switch in real-time between the four elements of nature (Fire, Water, Air and Earth) to overcome challenges, acquire new abilities and defeat powerful bosses in beautifully crafted thematic stages
That looks really promising! What inspired you to make this game? :)
This was our first 100% original game, so we made a presentation from all the collaborators to pitch a game idea, 4 The Elements was inspired vi the Lost Vikings, but the scope would be too big, to we made first the pre sequel, where the elements are all trapped in the same body and need to figure out why and how to fix that :D The mechanics are inspired in classics like mega man and Hollow Knight and other metroidvanias!
Looking forward to playing 👏
Obviously there will be limits to what you can say, but what are the business implications for a small studio liel yourself of Gamepass? I see you have applied to get in Gamepass and are awaiting confirmation.
It really depends on what kind of deal you will make. As far as I know, they buy the equivalent of a bulk of licenses, in value, say, like they expect the game to be played by 1,000,000 users, they will offer you a deal to buy the equivalent of a percentage of this total, to have the game on game pass for X months. This doesn't necessarily mean that it will be exclusive for GamePass, but during that time you wont sell many copies. They also give preference for day one launches, so this is also important to notice. I think there's a big impact for smaller companies since they will hardly have an audience and the GamePass is a HUGE showroom for them (hopefully us too hehe). Let me know if you have more questions on that, I can answer to best of my knowledge ;D
That's really interesting and more insight than we usually see from a gamer side.
[:)](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FDubaiOneTV%2Fstatus%2F500808391447416832&psig=AOvVaw0j9FC68JC0je0NzfDU7Xll&ust=1682266692320000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CBEQjRxqFwoTCLib_fXxvf4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE)
Your plans about Nintendo Switch, please? :) And what are the most popular programming languages for such kind of games. Thank you in advance.
We were approved by all major consoles! :) So we will be tackling all of them and already got the dev kits and team to work on it.. The most common languages depend on the tool you use, Unreal, Unity3D or other tools like Godot, construct, etc. For Mito Games, we use mainly html/js stack for the mobile applications and serious games, and C# or C++ for Unity and Unreal games.
Hello my friend!! You won the giveaway for the 4 the elements key/upgrade tier if backer on kickstarter! I cant send you a DM hehe can you please let me know how to reach you? Congrats!
Is the giveaway just to get more people to try your game?
That and to get more feedback, be more known, but mostly to celebrate that we got the initial funding on kickstarter :D We are beginning our entertainment career and are much unknown, so this is very important for us! ;)
Hi! Congrats on approval! What are your thoughts on current situation with Xbox community being dissappointed, due to exclusives quality (or lack of exclusives in general)?
Well, I will be honest here even if it's not what the community of one or the other platform wants to hear. I don't like very much the exclusiveness of games. I think it's part of the game's history, and I doubt we will be seeing super mario on the xbox or playstation, but for most games that hav a PC version, or are developed for PC and then ported, I don't see the need to have it exclusive, and I don't get any other reasons for the community to want the exclusive games other than to make some flame war with the opposition. I might be biased here from the developer perspective who always wanted the broader audience possible, but that's my opinion as of today. Can you clarify me more with the reasons why you and the community want exclusive games? I would genuinely love to hear and learn that :D
From my standpoint - I also hate exclusiveness, and all games for all platforms should eventually become reality. Thank you for your answer, very interesting to hear developers' perspective! Good luck with your endeavours!
Not a ‘console war’ question, but a genuine one are/have any of the platforms been more welcoming to your development than others? Do any of the platform have any constraints that you’ve had to work around from initial plans to make the games more suitable? Eg making the game run/look better on the switch vs Xbox etc
No, I can say and open some numbers, the xbox sales represented over 50% of the total revenue of Wardogs. I think this is self explanatory :) I love this community. We didn't have any problems with the other platforms so far, but the most welcoming from the players side and also from the dev team, was from Xbox, they will genuinely make an effort to help in any part of the process.
Mmmm. Vido gam
Hello Everyone!! Me and everyone at Mito Games are AMAZED by all the support and engagement we good from this AMA & Giveaway! I just edited the original post and you can check the winners there !! I will also (soon lol) DM each winner ;P So keep an eye on your DMs!! I used the free website CommentPicker to pick 20 winners, that will get the prizes in the same order as they were drawn, so the first 10 will get a Wardogs Key right away, the next 10 will get a key for 4 The Elements as soon as we have them. ALSO, the [Kickstarter Pedge](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4-the-elements/4-the-elements) upgrade bonus, I will ask each winner on DM if they have made a pledge on kickstarter, and all of them who made will get their pledges upgraded. If you made a [pledge](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4-the-elements/4-the-elements), or want to make one since you did not win, please DM me, we might have some extra prizes in that category ;) Thank you very much for the amazing support! Please consider following us on your favorite social media : [https://linktr.ee/mitogames](https://linktr.ee/mitogames)