It’s been a while since we last heard from the team at Ruffian Games in Dundee. A couple of ice ages at least. So it was a pleasure to see some news and even mention of a new game from the company, yesterday afternoon.
In a blog on the new Tribal Towers website, Ruffian’s Billy Thomson broke the news that the company is not working on another Crackdown game.
“We’re not working on Crackdown 3!
I know, I know it’s as shocking as finding out your favourite Lasagne is chock-a-block with Red Rum’s offspring. The thing is it’s simply not an offer that’s on our production table right now, so rather than dwell on this lets get back to the real story here.”
The real story turns out to be the aforementioned Tribal Towers – though there’s little actual information in the piece, apart from a slick piece of concept art.
Billy does reveal, in some detail, the company’s plans for the future, the revelation which inspired the company to work on its first original, self-funded game and why indie gaming isn’t just for amateurs…
“I wasn’t alone in this respect, we had all come away with the same feeling and this led to our little group of Ruffians discussing why this was the case as we travelled home. The key thing we all put this down to was that these teams had nobody to answer to other than themselves, they were completely free to do whatever they wanted to, they didn’t have to ask for the permission of a publisher to make any decision regardless of how insane or risky their ideas might seem, all they had to do was justify they had merit to themselves.
We agreed that as designers this level of freedom would be incredibly inspiring and empowering but also accepted that it would likely be somewhat unnerving and intimidating at the same time. As a developer you can complain about the overbearing publisher, but the reality is that same publisher provides an invaluable safety net as they provide financial backing and ultimately they – should – take on a fair slice of the responsibility of how the game will finally turn out. Self-publishing would provide the creative freedom we all craved but it would also bring with it great risk to the company’s finances as well as its creative reputation – which to be fair is something we want to address as it isn’t where we want it to be right now.”
The company is promising a blog per week from this point on and makes a serious point that we keep trying to hammer into some developers round these here parts (with real hammers):
If we’ve learned anything at all from the best Indie games it’s that it’s never too early to start letting people know about your game. You need to be open with the design, show off the development process, concept art, asset renders, screen shots and of course let them play the game. These are our first tentative steps towards this rather daunting goal.
Ruffian has started a very limited friend and family testing programme to get the game into the hands of trusted contacts and start building the community around Tribal Towers.
We’re very happy to see them back – and of course the all New Scottish Games Network is here for all of the latest updates, news, previews and exclusives. You listening, Ruffian?
You can – and should – read the whole update over on the Tribal Towers website…
