Hi! I’m Thomas Altenburger (a.k.a. MrHelmut), and I’ve been running Flying Oak Games (FOG) for 9 years and onward with my associate Florian Hurtaut. We are mostly known for the games NeuroVoider and ScourgeBringer.
Last year I wrote a review of 2021 from our company’s perspective (very much inspired by Jake Brikett’s own 2021 review), and it has been an occasion to reflect on many years of running an indie studio. 2021 was weird, as it was a year during which we have been mostly under the radars and that was unusual for us after years of open development and constant exposure. We were also expecting 2022 to be a turning point, so what have we been up to in 2022?
2021 ended with us finally settling on a new game concept after a year of minor difficulties to adapt to a new kind of design process (i.e. we dropped open development and fun-based design to work with a more standard design process because the project required it and publishers/partners understand this way of working better). Our expectations for 2022 were to achieve a prototype of that new game, while releasing ScourgeBringer on new platforms and expanding the company. Quite the program!
After releasing on all possible consoles in 2021 (including an improbable release on PS Vita mere days before Sony closed its online store), the last platforms to conquer were iOS and Android, and gosh… it has been the long haul.
We have our own tech and are used to port to consoles (console ports barely take us a week, including all the certification guidelines) but mobiles really aren’t our jam at all. I have severe PTSD from working with that specific mobile platform with contradictory documentation and layers of deprecated APIs (I don’t think I have to name it). I’m very thankful to Seed by Seed who helped us with adapting the controls and difficulty of the game for mobiles, that was a huge relief out of the porting effort. Overall, ScourgeBringer took way too much time to reach mobiles. The ports ended up being really good (with an average rating of 4.9/5.0 on iOS!!), but the exhaustion from bloated APIs and eventual frictions with third parties made the whole project very expansive. It took us about a year to release those ports (while working on and off on them). In the end, the release has been doing well, and from a pure business perspective those ports have been profitable much quicker than we anticipated despite the unusual cost (thrice what it would have cost us to make a console port). But the worst part is the mental health points I loose along the way. I’m still digesting this release, but for the time being I can hardly consider that it was worth it. Time will tell. The ports are very well received and maybe future mobile opportunities will dampen my emotions.
We’re this close. We were expecting to finish it much sooner, but the mobile ports of ScourgeBringer and other endeavors drove our attention away for the most part of the year, but those were positive opportunities worth investigating (so much happens in a game studio than just making games). Our ultimate goal was to finish the vertical slice by the end of 2022, but it’s now clear that it’s going to slide to the end of January 2023, which is within the margin of acceptability.
Things are going smoothly, we’ve been able to work on it exclusively since June, and we fully recruited the team which has been rocking it. We’re now 5 on it (2 on site, 3 around the world), and planning to go up to 7 soon (what a team, really 💜). We’re super pumped and I really can’t wait to see this VS coming together with its unique mood and game feel.
For the time being, we’re self-funding the prototype. We had parties interested in funding the prototype but we felt like we needed to go in full submarine mode and cut ourselves from negotiations for a while (especially me because it drove too much my attention away from the game at a moment I needed to be focused). We’ve been awarded a state grant to make the prototype, so that helped with the decision to be free of influences and mind free.
So I went in hyper-focus mode. So focused that I’ve missed sync’ing the team and we were slowly drifting from perspectives. The team also struggled a bit from the prototype not being tangible enough for a long time (we likely had the team onboard too soon, I wanted people to have the opportunity to be part of the concept ideation but I feel like I haven’t built enough bridges). All of this settled, and the VS is now being assembled with January likely being about polish, and I’ve also took on hiring a producer to help building better bridges for the team flow (we’re already set, this is not a job offer ✌).
Our next objective will be to get the game funded (I’ve been back on the business chair), but that might very well be done by the time this post gets posted, or close enough, we hope so. We’ll then start the production! The pipeline and all the tools are done, which means that we’re likely off for 2 years of production now.
After ScourgeBringer, we wanted to make the studio more future-proof and be less on the line. The success of the game opened us some opportunities. At the end of 2021, we were right in an industry high (investment cash was flowing following the COVID because the video game industry was identified as a safer bet in a context of crisis, and studios were being bought like hot pancakes) and we received multiple offers to co-build that future. Some were too aggressive (and turned down), and the other ended up drying out because, well, war happened and a recession in the industry suddenly started to loom.
But things are fine! We were super busy on our new project anyway and I needed to cut myself from those signals for a while anyway. Our plans to scale up a bit are still on the table, they were just postponed by basically a year. But now it’s moving forward! We’re moving to new offices literally now, and we’re still discussing with partners about our new project which goes with 2 more positions on site (doubling ourselves, woo!), so hopefully we won’t be just 2 in that wider space.
Last year I also mentioned that we were looking into working on existing franchises to have more diverse sources of income, and while it didn’t come to fruition this year, it’s still very much a topic and we might pitch some concepts in a close future (also, Nintendo, if you’re reading, we’d love to work on F-Zero or Metroid 🤣).
There’s still a bunch of speculations about all those possibilities. It may happen that everything will crumble, which would mean that we would have to scale down instead of scaling up (e.g. getting back to a smaller office, and scoping down our ongoing project to fit a budget that we can self-sustain), but we’re prepared should this happen. However, our energy and mood is toward the better version of this story and we have our fighting spirit and polish-centric attitude to hopefully be convincing about that project’s perspectives. What’s sure is that we’ve known big lows in our studio history, as well as highs, and we’re trying to be resilient now, or at least trying to better surf those possible highs and lows. Even with “if’s” around, the years have taught us to put some distance and approach situations with a much more positive attitude (and we also have to be self-aware about the fact that we’re lucky survivors).
2023 incentives will mostly be about funding that new game, after which point things should go smoothly (up to when we’ll be a few months from launch and panicking because playtests are catastrophic, like most productions end up being before a miraculous last stretch).