The Evolution of Dynasty Games PG Connects Digital #2

so we're going to talk to us about the evolution of dynasty games obviously it'd be great to sort of make sure we everything works with the audio fortunately we have in the background James who is the resident steel media expert on making sure audio and video work as much as possible within the constraints obviously of a system lies oome so obviously we'll try and make sure that we support your your show on that as much as possible but enough of me and I said it yourself perfect thank you very much Oscar for the introduction let me just quickly start this cream chair so I hope that works now I'm also a little bit nervous about the video but that sequence will come later so I hope it will work as planned yes

hello everybody my name is Matias I'm the CEO of topless productions and I'm very delighted to be able to talk to you today about the evolution of our dynasty series in fact this is the first time I have to speak into a little tiny dot on the frame of my laptop and not stand up in front of the audience and interact properly so I'll see where this goes first time for for me I guess for many of my co speakers here as well so in these times nevertheless I'm very glad that the opportunity is there to still be able to directly speak to you so looking also at the watch I know it's almost lunchtime and let's move on I would like to quickly introduce you to chocolates productions we are an Austrian German publisher the name comes from a little lake that beautiful lake actually high up in the Alps it is not what you can see here as my background

this is actually a background from one of our games that I will touch on a little bit later so we are very small but I have to say highly efficient team of industry veterans and also passionate gamers our aim and main idea is to develop games with heart and soul you can see it on the bottom half of the page a couple of titles that we have released in the past let's twelve months and I would just quickly like to point out two of them I will speak about the dynasty series in more detail but for example we have launched football tactics and Glory that not only is featured by our former world champion lotta mateus but also has quite a unique and fresh approach to match mechanics in terms of a rapid turn-based fashion so something very interesting look into and then of course for everybody who's really interested in the gaming industry as such med games tycoon actually a game

where you can't play being a developer and a publisher creating the titles of your dreams and make big money in this awesome industry anyway we also own the giant brand which are titles such as the industry giant and hotel giant which we are currently in the process of reviving we are active along the classic whole value chain so we do development we have an own studio and we work partially exclusive partially non-exclusive with many other indie developers and studios across the world of course we do the full publishing range including third-party publishing publishing our own titles and so forth we work with many marketing experts across the world be it for social media read for classic PR campaigns events and and so forth and also we serve our distribution we are listed with some of the larger retail

stores directly especially in Germany Austria and Switzerland but also have partners across the whole world where we can reach into the larger outlets more or less directly of course we are always on the lookout for additional developers and and go tell and so if you see some of our games if you like them if you like what we are showing you today then please feel free to directly reach out so speaking of games with heart and soul you know we had let's say history of doing classic relation games and then we decided let's add something more to this yeah it's add heart and soul to these games so we asked ourselves what is needed for this and then we thought of the dynasty series where you not only have a classic functional simulation

part but it opens up a much deeper gameplay in terms of social life interaction and many things that actually have to do with the underlying that's a technical function of this game but give much more to the player back so we started with one of the most and classic functional simulations out there farming of course there is a large part of farming infamous dynasty the technical farming and everything around this but we never had the let's say idea to exceed all the good farming simulation games that are out there in terms of technical correctness number of machineries and so forth but we wanted to add this heart and soul to the game so we started with social activities infamous dynasty you not only do the

farming the farming work basically and the farming tasks but you can drive around you can meet people you can talk to people you can make or you can work for them and you get rewards you can fulfill tasks you can repair their homes or their buildings you can plow their fields and so on and you get rewards in terms of machinery and other assets and you also get social points now with these social points the more you get the more social actions will become available to you you can also interchange some of those social points with real money and get additional equipment a little bit cheaper than you would need to have it if you buy it in the shops later in the game as you progress with the social topics you can flirt you can meet the partner of your life you can marry and then and this is another opening in fact

your partner will support you on your farm with daily tasks such as collecting eggs from the chicken or milking the cattle and so forth you can get kids so you have a real farmers life also included in the pure simulation plus there is a lot of other stuff that is directly concerned with you as the main player you have to take care of yourself you have to eat and you have to sleep to be rested otherwise you will get kind of penalties in your daily tasks you will be slower you will be tired and you will not be able to carry them out as good as you would if this wasn't the case so take care of yourself take care of your family that's very important and there are many other activities you can go fishing you can befriend a dog you can actually fly a drone and explore your vast fields and everything that you have I will show you a couple of of the activities here on the next chart you

can see some screenshots that is everything included in in this game so the idea was to basically bring a technical farming simulation game to life to a real life and for the player to be able to experience what it is like to be a farmer an important part is the repairing so many times things just breaks we have to repair them you have to renovate your buildings your stables you can redecorate your own your own house and so forth so there is a lot of activities included that round up the whole picture basically of a farmer and give you the opportunity to be a virtual farmer that is let's say as close as possible to the to the real life so that was the idea when we came up with this heart and soul part for these games in

fact some people give us the feedback that now this is kind of farming simulator meets the Sims this is a concept that has proven to be very successful and certainly something that we are further pursuing now with lamb magics dynasty which just entered early access about six weeks ago we have kept many of the good things of farmers dynasty Oh bite in a completely different setting which is now located high up in the mountains and woods basically where you are slowly taking over an old lumber mill from your aunt and uncle there again you can see some of the impressions from the early access stage of the game besides the mix of functional simulation and life simulation in lumber Jack's dynasty we have added and are still continuing to add a third component which in this case is a quest driven

story mode so while some of these quests enable additional functionalities or abilities for the players some others are just purely for story purposes so a player can choose whether they want to play in kind of a sandbox mode explore the vast world cut on as many trees as possible and make them into wooden products or whether they want to follow the storyline some things will just enable while following the storyline but it is not necessary to enjoy the game without the story so this is a very important component that we added to in contrast to farmers dynasty the the story line and also a second thing that basically looks into this kind of evolution we are taking here is character development so you have to learn certain abilities as you go along and then you can improve and depending

which abilities that is you actually start being quicker in cutting down trees or you are stronger you can carry more things or you can run faster and so forth so there is a lot of abilities that you can basically play around with yes the game still is an early access there is a road map of additional ideas and we also of course looking forward to feedback from our community I cannot spoil too much what's on the plate but there are some additional knives mechanics to be expected coming up further developing and and evolution izing so to say this series here now let's have a look into yet another game that is curved in our development pipeline it's called trucker's dynasty Cuba Libre so with trucker's dynasty Cuba Libre what we did here is we took again a

functional underlying basis which is the trucking business in this case but we put it into a historical setting which is the post refuge revolutionary Cuba so this will give the whole gameplay yet another spin in terms of that there will be influences not everything may be super correct with the time back then but there will be influences scarce resources a lot of needs to improve for the player to be able to play this game so in Cuba Libre you are to take over a very old and almost abandoned truck business and you have to go through the history go through the hard times back in the days make your life care for your family and also make decisions there will be some decisions that you will need to t that you will need to take as you move along in this game which is yet

another component that we have added so decision tree so to say or will be adding and that will influence the outcome of the game as well so again this is an early development stage there will be lots of original Cuban music there will be the atmosphere that will be for the player able to to enjoy an experience and of course there will be the good parts basically of our simulation game and also with addition to all the social aspects and the life simulation aspects that we have here so let's move on to the final title that I would like to talk about today and oh yeah I'm sorry I almost forgot here a couple of screenshots first screenshots that we have available so you can

already see the the Kuban setting you can see some of the beautiful old cars that will be incorporated in the game and many more to be to be expected the next title i want to talk about is medieval dynasty and medieval dynasty is not only a evolution it is almost a revolution of what we have done before because in medieval dynasty we have switched away from the first time from the functional underlying simulation basis to a overarching life simulation we want to reflect what was life in the harsh medieval times and for this we added a very important gameplay aspect and that is survival so medieval times were very harsh there were lots of risks lurking around every corner dangerous and so forth so you need to be able to survive in a medieval dynasty we'll start out basically alone somewhere out

in the woods and you have to yeah basically make your way you have to find food you have to hunt or you have to collect vegetables and and berries you have to farm later on you have to craft tools you have to defend yourself there's a lot of wild animals around that could attack you also medieval times were times of villains so you may be attacked even by a couple of other people which are also as NPC's in the open world so the survival aspect is one of the key gameplay functions that we've added to this and it will draw a lot of attention from the player the other one is the building from scratch as I mentioned you start out without anything and you have to basically get around in the world and build up a village from absolutely nothing craft tools collect the

materials and so forth so this is a very important part that needs to be needs to be concluded as well the player can actually acquire new villages and in terms of NPCs who will also help out they will help out doing the tasks the player doesn't want to do and by speaking of tasks a player doesn't want to do there is a very sophisticated skill tree so remember we started in lumberjack with a very first basic skill development system now we have a very sophisticated skill tree there are lots of abilities that you can acquire and find you in over the time and so there is yeah a lot that that can be explored and can be expected also this kind of adds real let's say RPG or partially RPG experience to the game and this RPG experience will be also undermined by a chapter driven story so there will be

various chapters there will be an overarching large story there will be various chapters that have winning conditions so you will need to fulfill certain tasks reach certain goals do certain things to be able to fulfill and conclude this chapter that then will allow you to level up in certain other aspects and enter the next the next level of the storyline again because people like to roam around in the open world and explore there are a vast majority of most number of opportunities to do so it's a free open world you don't directly have to follow the storyline you can explore you can play sandbox you can build up the village but in the end of course it will prove very worthwhile because you're opening up so many other gameplay options to follow that story and go through that so in essence what we're trying to do and of course there are many other fun topics and things to explore we are

trying to capture the real rural medieval life with all its challenges and rewards and for this to be as authentic as possible and I will show you now a first couple of screenshots that display that we have switched to the Unreal 4 engine away from our proprietary engine the other titles are made with our proprietary engine and this one here now is only for opening up also to a new dimension of of graphic possibilities so basically what I would like to say is that each game is a unique combination of genres and gameplay elements that followed a certain let's say stepwise approach in terms of game evolution with adding new elements putting the social and the life in the middle of all of these adding survival adding quests and so forth and yeah I would like to conclude with our

trailer for medieval dynasty so you get the first impression how this how this works and now I do hope that everything really functions and that the sound works as well let me quickly move on let me tell you a story story of survival a story of unity [Music] story written day after day each and every one of you brothers and sisters a story of family a story which will never end as long as

the dynasty continues [Music] so and with this I would like to conclude of course medieval dynasty will not be the end of the journey we do have a lot of additional ideas and a couple of game concepts already written and and up for implementation to continue our dynasty series so many thanks for your attention and I'm happy to take any questions if they are thank you very much great and the video worked so many troubles with video it's always a bit difficult with sharing on a platform like this but to actually see it working was great and the audio came out pretty well and I think it just shows you know

the evolution that you guys have gone through in terms of making different games focusing on different kinds of themes but still focusing on a simulation experience or a kind of an immersion experience in that in each of the themes I think you know particularly when you get up to mimic medieval dinner see you're now seeing you know visually an engaging thing where you can put yourself into that context and so how much how many lessons do you think other developers can take from your your journey and we walk what do you think would be their the one thing you'd want to share with other developers who want to kind of improve and build upon their core skill sets well I personally think it is very important not to want everything at the beginning not to take on a project that has it all because then this is either likely to become very very complex or probably fail but to take on an evolutionary approach where you first test out things how are they being accepted by the community how players like the game what do they suggest to

improve and then stepwise implement the next level of gameplay elements that you would like to introduce so if you have a huge idea try to break it down into let's say individual layers and start with the first two or three layers and try them out and then stack on top as you go along in the development journey and that makes a lot of sense to me because in some ways it shows that even with big game like this you're actually still doing a lot of the same things that people are doing hyper casual games you're up see a lot simpler are trying to do which is to hone in on simple things to explore and to do small things at a time and then build on that over time is that is that a fair assessment yes exactly I mean everybody who's played let's say a farming a classic farming simulation knows there's a lot of basic grinding to do you have to plow the fields back and forth forth and back and so forth so those are the basic things but but we see that players

really like to do it and it's enjoyable and then you had had things here and there that you think could be a good and clever extension to that and that it draws somebody really into the game and what we said to ourselves is we would like we don't want to be technically the best out there we cannot achieve that we know there are others out there that's fine but we want to be as authentic as possible and have as many real-life aspects included and so this is this is why we do we add layer by layer basically of those little things which in itself may not be that complex but if you have a whole array of them to do and then there's already a lot of a lot of tasks that you need to fulfill to move on to the next levels or that you can just enjoy doing yeah and I've lost count of how many hours I've spent in no man's sky mining yeah I mean it's games the amount of time I spent in Skyrim picking flowers I mean there is something about these kind of mundane quotes mundane tasks which

are inherently satisfying because they're in a context of escapism and context of not being dependent on the outcome for any real world specific action and I mean do you think it's happed into a deep underlying psychology of a player probably yes I think I mean people want to enjoy some tasks they do and people want to relax if they play games of course there are those hardcore shooters and so forth they are played for other reasons for other entry payment reasons but if you want to have a casual game that is relaxing where you can enjoy maybe a good scenery or also learn about things how certain things work this this grinding is a good way to go about and then also it's always the the reward that the reward what comes once you have enough enough money to buy the next good machine or once you have

plot this nice field and you see the crops growing and so this is something this this hardwork reward mechanism that works very well in various levels in a various settings if you if you repair a car and then you have the shiny new car sitting there this is great and we have especially with farmers dynasty but also with magic Zionists you know many people who have several hundreds of hours if not even for 4-digit hours over thousand hours spending into the game explore the full map plowed every field twice or three times and this is great because they get the feedback they really like it and they enjoy themselves in this game well because it's tapping and I think it's kind of an aspect to the first I cuz you're an optimization and that kind of I also refer to is the hot dog economy so you know the reason why you have eight hot dogs and six hot dog buns is because there's always an imbalance and you're always trying to

find that moment of getting that kind of I've got to do a bit of this and I got to do a bit of that and I've got to keep that balance going and I think that cake sustains you know the attention of the player in a game like this I mean I don't know this particular release model but a lot of them are here's a game is released and then each year were updated do you do that or do you look for a more frequent level of kind of events and promotions and activity in the game so what we do is as we currently with the example of lumberjack we just started the early XS six weeks ago we have a road map there will be four major updates coming where there are new gameplay elements edit and also we plan to provide additional content in the future we would like to get the feedback of the community what they really like and then of course there are some some gameplay boats that are frequently asked for like a co-op mode and so forth

and we think about these things how to implement them and how to make it even more let's say attractive to to the game result I think it's an interesting space and I'm biased on this because I mean having worked in service games for so long you know the stuff that we learn even on PlayStation Home on a console the ability to give people something regularly on a weekly basis that's small predictable and reliable can be dramatically effective in terms of retaining and maintaining an audience but again it's finding the right cadence for the right game and then not every game is going to be the same and you know I think it's I think every developer has is working at a what can we do be what's right for the audience to sustain and build and scale a community yes absolutely so with this series currently we are in decay in the classic mode of developing a game and then you sell the game it's not those it's a rapid additional content creation kind of setups and also

it always needs time to actually implement and then it may have an even bigger impact on the overall gameplay makes the whole setup in the whole game more complex but we do think about those little bits and pieces that we can intelligent the add to as exactly you said to keep the game appearing attractive and being up-to-date and providing new content so that there's a constant stream of interest absolutely absolutely I think that's always gonna be a tough balance and the thing unless there's any other questions I mean I said oh I should ask you one one we couldn't answer previously but I think would also apply to you do you think you've seen a change of use behavior during the COBE period particularly because it feels to me like this is a great escape for somebody particularly those who have more time on their hands and can't get out this seems to me a great way to actually go and have an alternative life yes so what we could

observe was of course an increase in in gameplay you could also see it if you look at certain statistics you can see the typical curve that goes up and down over the week and then in the evenings you have more and during the day there is nothing that kind of completely was completely deranged after the the shutdown so mid-march and basically you could see that people were much more online and much more into the games and playing actively showing exactly like you said that there's nothing else to do you kind of go outside you're you're stuck at home and and so this is to maybe to escape or just to enjoy and have the additional time that you usually don't have to play the games yeah I'm still early absolutely right and on that note I thank you very much for your time