Interview done on October 28th 2024
In this new interview on DCDL, Paul Schnepf, developer of the brilliant tower-defense game Thronefall (see article here) along with Jonas Tyroller, tells us about the making of the game and the creation of their studio Grizzly Games. Enjoy!
Pour la version française, CLIQUER ICI !
Hello Paul, thank you so much for agreeing to answer a few questions about your game Thronefall, one of the most captivating indie games I’ve played these past few years.
First, let’s talk about your studio, Grizzly Games. Of how many people is it composed? When, where and why was it created? What’s your nationality? Who’s in charge of the art, the coding, the music, the business side and so on?
We’re just two people at the moment, Jonas and me (Paul). We founded Grizzly Games together with some fellow students (who by now are pursuing other paths) during our studies in the game-design program at HTW Berlin (our university). Initially, we did so to publish Superflight, a game we created as part of the program. Jonas and I are both from Germany. For Thronefall, Jonas took care of the game-design details and the music, while I did most of the art and SFX. Programming was split equally between us.
What are Jonas’s and your academic and professional backgrounds? Do you work on your games full-time or do you have other jobs on the side?
We both studied in the game-design program at HTW Berlin and we have been working full-time on our games ever since. Jonas also has a pretty popular YouTube channel called Jonas Tyroller.
At first sight, when I discovered Thronefall, I thought it looked like a mix between Age of Empires (the economy, the fighting mechanics) and Kingdom Two Crowns (the night attacks, the coin system). What were your influences (if you had any)? What games did you like when you were kids or teenagers? What do you play now, if you still have time to play?
That’s great to hear, because that’s pretty much the gap we intended Thronefall to fill. We both like traditional RTS games but tend to be overwhelmed with them. We wanted to craft an experience that scratches a similar itch while being highly accessible and less demanding on your time while still offering some depth. I used to play lots of (competitive) multiplayer games when I was younger. Nowadays I try to play many different games but usually stick to the shorter ones. Discovering new indie games with unique approaches is most interesting to me.
About the game itself, how would you qualify its art style and the gameplay loop? What engine did you use? How many years in total did you spend working on the game? Is the final result consistent with what you had in mind when the first ideas emerged?
Thronefall is developed in Unity. The art style we developed caters to our limited resources as a two-person team (where none of us is a dedicated artist). It had to be both simple to create and easy to read for players. For the gameplay loop, we were heavily inspired by the Kingdom series, but wanted to create more depth in the strategic decisions while also offering more interesting spatial gameplay by migrating it into 3D space. Surprisingly, the final game is pretty close to what we had in mind with the first prototype. It took us about twenty-four months.
discovered your game a long time ago now, at the beginning of the early access, when only a couple of maps were available, and I’ve been following all the content releases since. What are the pros and cons of an early-access release? Were the feedbacks from the Steam community helpful?
Thronefall was the first game we went into early access with and we have been very happy about that decision. While it also was exhausting to monitor all the feedback and try to make everyone happy, our engaged community providing us with endless streams of thoughtful and constructive criticism has shaped Thronefall into a much better game over the course of early access.
Each night on each map is actually a puzzle the player must solve, sometimes easy, sometimes hard, and there usually are many ways of working out the riddle. What makes Thronefall gripping is the fact that these challenges are very well balanced. How much energy and time did all the tweaking require when you were busy fine-tuning the game? Was it somehow the hardest part? Was it purely mathematical or more instinctive, taking into account the perception of your playerbase?
Yeah, that was definitely where the most work went on the game-design side. I think Jonas’s approach was not so much mathematical but mostly a mix between instinctive decisions and taking into account community feedback.
What is your take on the current crisis the video-game industry is going through? Are you somehow impacted? Triple-As seem to be getting less and less profitable. Are indie games like yours, made with love and a reasonable scope, the future of the video-game business?
It does not impact us much, since we don’t rely on any outside funding. I don’t believe indie games alone are the future. There’s definitely a place for both AAA and indie games.
About AI, it has become the object of many heated debates. What is your opinion on the matter? Is it a tool you already use or wouldn’t mind using or is it a threat that will kill artistic creation and many jobs?
For me, the only truly useful application of AI so far is as a better « search engine », structuring and making accessible the vast knowledge we have gathered as humans.
To conclude, could you tell me about your other games? I mean the ones you made before Thronefall. What about the future? Will you add new maps to the game, new game modes (I like the classic one, quests A to F on a map and then on to the next) or is it finished? Are you already thinking about a whole new project? Would you like to explore other genres or will you stick to what you now master?
Thronefall’s development is finished and we don’t plan to add new content to it. In the future, we plan to explore new ideas and genres. It’s what fascinates us the most about indie games and so far our games have all been very different from one another.
Thank you so, so much for your time, Paul, and for the enlightening insights!
Florian Baude (Des Clics & des Lettres)
THRONEFALL (article about the game)