Industrial Toys talks about the Morning Star graphic novel

okay Pocket Gamer at E3 day day two of e3 almost say day 3 V3 no U checking out cool games and you have a cool game which you're not going to talk about are you Alex you're going to talk about a cool comeback instead which is kind of interesting yes I would love to well my name is Alex copian and I'm the founder of industrial toys we're a mobile game Studio here in sunny California in Pasadena in fact and uh we are working on a couple things we have a uh a shooter for mobile called Morning Star and uh we were just talking about our graphic novel that we're going to be showing anyone your shoot at the moment you temp me with meetings about your shooter seen show me something else oh I'm glad you've seen it glad it it's awesome it's not VAP but uh as far as you know but it's oh it's true um but it's you're taking a very different approach to Shooters which we'll talk about maybe when we can talk about that but also you're kind of coming with this interactive graphic novel to kind of like come a month before the game comes out yes so what what's the thinking behind that well you know I think

fundamentally um we're really interested in trying to design for the device we're very we use uh iPads we use iPhones like that's where we're gaming right now um and you know the whole company was started on a premise that we we just kind of want more games uh that sort of appeal to to us and and Gamers like us so we've really tried to design uh our experiences uh to use input uh right you know natively uh and to give players an experience that sort of make sense for the way they're using these devices that's that's how how we're designing our shooter so controls are really important to us and sort of the like the play Loop how long is like play session um story is also really important to us and so we tried to figure out how can we tell a story that's deep uh that's got really cool characters a great setting it gives you a sense that you're in this big universe that's believable and credible and and cool and futuristic and all that great stuff um in a way that makes sense for mobile um so one of the things that we're doing is we're we're telling that story in more than one way it's not just in the shooter we're actually building a app which is a graphic novel it's inspired by graphic

novels it's it's a little bit more in our opinion you can you can explore scenes there are choices that you can make uh uh when you're talking to characters uh there are things that you can find uh when you're when you're reading the story and all that stuff uh folds into your experience in the universe because it goes up into the cloud uh we save it on our servers and when you uh go into our universe say in the shooter it knows what you've done so anything you might collect while reading the book you can use in the game characters that you that you meet while reading the book will will know be aware of that interaction while you're playing the game and special things will happen uh things that you encounter in the game uh you might be able to go read more about when you go back to the book so it's a nice way to tell a deep story give a sense that you're in a big universe and to create a little bit of kind of an ecosystem but not in kind of an overbearing way that's really in your face makes more sense for mobile there have been some kind of tried this in the past end up like a fairly clunky you unlock this thing in the companion app and then this other thing unlocked like

gun unlocks in the game so I mean how you try to get around that kind of clunkiness poity a a couple of things that made uh that made me think that we were at a point where we can do this really nice and seamlessly is just where the technology is right now so you know these devices are always connected and it's a great thing about iPads and and iPhones you don't have to think about going online they're always online um and the way the connectivity works is it's very seamless stuff happens behind the scenes and uh when you when you get an experience you go you know you're you're reading through the book and you collect something you don't you don't have to go and and sort of manually activate something it's it's just sort of like magically happens for you um and really sort of set it up in a way where you can kind of have your cake and eat it too so if you go through uh the experience and you uncover certain things and and you want to go see what maybe you missed you can go back and do that stuff as well so you can you can kind of get all the experience if you want the other thing that we got excited about is that um it's not just us that thought it was a cool idea we sort of reached out to folks that we have a lot

of respect for that we might wanted to collaborate on on this so we John scaly is writing the story behind uh the book and and the game he's writing all the pros um and uh and that that sort of kind of UPS the level of it uh for everyone involved certainly for us um like Cho doing all the artwork s Chans doing the music so it's uh it's it's not just a um an idea that we thought was cool but it it's uh we've got some really fantastic folk working on it so the end result looks pretty sweet too but equally you're kind of a still a kind of fairly small startup so you kind of have one big project you want to do which is a game and then you have now another fairly big project which yeah it's nuts so too much ambition or is is that the way it is these days you well you know I think in in in this space you know making games it's really all about doing something interesting doing something new um because there's just there there's so much out there there's so much choice for people which is which is great um but if you're if you're just going to do what everybody else has done it it's it's you know how much is that

how exciting is that you know so we're going to think big try to try to really pull it off if if we don't well but but things are looking pretty good so we're very excited about it excellent thanks for your talking sure thing