TorontoGameDevs.com: Probably the two biggest Strategy RPG's now-a-days are Fire Emblem, and Disgaea - both Japanese titles. Why do you think it isn't a genre that a lot of North American studios tackle?
Joe: Well on the console those would likely be the two largest right now, but at the same time we’ve seen a lot of studios stepping up and building games in the genre. Over the last few years we’ve seen XCom and The Banner Saga really hit it out of the park, and there are really numerous games that have released on steam that are quite high quality from the Blackguards series, to King’s Bounty, to newer indie titles like Armello.
TorontoGameDevs.com: What's it like developing a game in Toronto? How has it been getting things like funding, or talent?
Joe: While we’re based in Toronto our development has really been an international effort. Our art director is based in Sweden, and our sound and music has been worked on by multiple people in the US. We’re looking at ramping up our in-house talent over the course of this year as we continue development on Darktide and look towards supporting the game into the future. We’ve been self-funded right from the get-go as we wanted to really build out the core idea before approaching gamers on Kickstarter. One thing we didn’t want to do was crowdfund the title before we had the core gameplay, world design, and how the campaign systems work and basic stories nailed down, otherwise that would be insanely hard to budget and I like to be really open and honest with the player base. By building out the core we’ve really eliminated any risk aspects and at the point we’re at now we’re extremely confident in what we need to finish things in a very high quality. Regarding location over the past few months we’ve actually been looking at studio space in Waterloo region. For the entirety of development we’ve been in Toronto, but being such a small self-funded studio the costs are quite high in comparison, and KW has an amazing talent pool to tap into as well as a few other game studios.
TorontoGameDevs.com: What's next for Darktide? Do you have a release date in mind for the game?
Joe: Right now we have the core gameplay built out but there is still a lot of work to do. We just recently finished replacing the entirety of the art as we unified everything and really upped the details and quality. There is still a lot of work to do polishing environments, effects, and character animations, but we’ve got a lot of the core complete. Also we used to have more of a rigid linear storyline before really keying in on the dynamic campaign system during our initial alpha testing. People really liked the system but wanted to see deeper interaction and consequences, and so we went back to the drawing board and have been spending a massive amount of time on the story rewriting components and writing a ton of new pathways the story can take. We’re very close to a point where we’re going to launch a Square Enix Collective campaign to get a lot more eyeballs on the game and let people see what we’ve been building, and then later in the year we’re looking at launching a campaign on Kickstarter.
![Metanet Software Would "Love To Bring [N++] To Switch"](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5516beafe4b0c6d76a97bb4d/1489880319809-LYAFA02PMF44GFRMO9L8/14055099_1125813754145922_3963339626902375160_n.jpg)
