RocwiseTeam

Soldiers of the Universe – An Interview

Hi Rocwise Entertainment, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for the opportunity.

 

Could you introduce yourselves and tell us about a bit yourselves?

Rocwise Entertainment has been formed by the leadership of our game director Engin YĆ¼ksel in 2016. After years of work in the fields of 3D Design and VFX, he decided to form a game development team. He presented his studio idea to the ā€œArmoya High Technologiesā€ which is our roof company. After getting the green light from the investors he formed Rocwise Entertainment. Rocwise’s first project was ā€œNef ā€“ The Awakeningā€ which is a Sci-Fi FPS game. But after 6 months into development process of the Nef ā€“ The Awakening, project has been put on hold and the development of Soldiers of The Universe has begun.

 

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Soldiers Of The Universe has just been released on Steam, can you tell us about it?

Soldiers of The Universe’s story revolves around our “Hakan Kahraman”. The Republic of Turkey has a secret organization called “Akinci Warriors” who specializes in secret military operations. Our hero Hakan takes over his father Selim Kahramanā€™s place as “The Toyga” of Akinci Warriors. He leads military operations to take his fatherā€™s revenge and he fights against the enemies of the state.

 

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Why did you feel that the story of Soldiers Of The Universe was an important story to tell?

As you know, middle-east is the cradle of civilization. Depicting the middle-east only as a warzone and world-center of terrorism is an unjust approach in our opinion. The storylines, locations, people and general depiction of the middle-east in video games and movies, doesn’t always do justice to real life. We’re not claiming that our title does but our priority at the beggining of our project was raising awarness to the terror problem in the middle east and all around the world. This goal is beyond our story. And as you can see, this project gave us the opportunity to talk to you about the subject. šŸ™‚ We want these distressing topic to stay just as a video game. We believe that the ever growing global gaming industry has enough power to change these kind of misconseptions.

 

The Soldiers Of The Universe game is a first person shooter, why did you choose that type of game to tell your story?

We think that FPS style approach is the best way to immerse players into the game. Also, our developers familiarity with this style was another factor.

 

What has the feedback been like to the game so far?

We recieved both positive and negative feedbacks since our release. And we took each and every one of them into account. We are aware that we made some rookie mistakes with our first project. But for small teams who try to develop with limited resources like ourselves, this is also an ongoing learning process. We try to stay in contact with players on social media.

 

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Soldiers Of The Universe has a single player story mode and local co-op mode as well as online co-op mode, as a developer it is important to have all of these modes in your game?

Adding co-op was in our minds at the beginning of the project. But it wasn’t finalized at the time and we had second thoughts about it. After the announcement of our game, we recieved hundreds of mails and messages from the players, passionately requesting a co-op mode. So we decided to implement this mode at the end of our early access period. Of course, adding gameplay variety to a game is important to the developers, but carrying out a player requested feature is far more satisfying.

 

How long have been working on Soldiers Of The Universe?

The core development process of this project took us 7 months. With only 7 people in the team, we worked non stop through holidays and weekends. We even slept in the office for countless days. Time constraints was the worst.

 

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Rocwise Entertainment are the also the publishers of Soldiers Of The Universe was this the plan from the beginning for Soldiers Of The Universe?

At the first stages of project development, we had several meetings with various publishers. But some of them acted timidly because of our games subject. So we decided to handle publishing process ourselves.

 

Could we see Soldiers Of The Universe on consoles in the future?

We’re not planning for the console version as of this moment. But you never know..

 

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Rocwise Entertainment are based in Turkey, what is the videogame industry like in Turkey? As an indie developer, can you tell us about some of challenges you faced in creating the game?

Unfortunately, the development community here is not very expansive. There are a handful of independent studios and some individual ventures. That’s all. Also academic education in the field of game development is really new here and it’s only available in a couple of universities. First members of these faculty’s didn’t even graduated yet. Academic branches aside, universities also have incubation facilities which supports eager developers. But these are limited too.

The biggest problem both individual and corporate ventures has to face is the lack of resources. We’re not talking about only financial resources. For example there is only one motion capture studio in Turkey which is in the University campus in Eskişehir. This is just one example. So, not every developer has the financial power, time or work force to use these limited resources. It’s even harder for small teams like us.

Another problem is about finding experienced development team members. Experienced members of community generally works for industry leaders out of the country which is understandable. And the freelancers charge for incredible amounts. Small development teams job still is really hard in Turkey. But an enthusiastic new generation is on the way. So we believe that all of these difficulties will disappear in time.

In the development process of Soldiers of The Universe, we had many difficulties both internal and external. We had to work with brutal deadlines and limited resources. We had problems with our programmers. Even had to seperate our ways with the lead developer in mid project. But the time constraints was the worst. Like I said before, we had to work with brutal deadlines. Just to fulfill our promises that we gave to the players. So at the end of the day, you forgot about those bad days šŸ™‚

Was the development of first project hard and tiresome? Yes, it was and still is. But will it open new doors for the developers here in Turkey that follows us? Also yes, and thats a good thought to get your drive from.

 

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Any message for the ComicBuzz readers?

Thank you all for taking your time to read our side of the development process. Hope to see you all in our next project. And Thanks to ComicBuzz again, for giving this opportunity to us.

 

We want to thank Rocwise Entertainment for all of their time.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/640050/Soldiers_of_the_Universe/Ā 

http://www.soldiersoftheuniverse.com/

 

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