Joana: Marketing a game is probably 50% of making an indie game, and it’s definitely the biggest challenge we face and any indie studio faces. How did you promote the game? How do you work with the community? What are the biggest challenges? Fundamentally, players should feel a connection to the characters they’re interacting with.Ĩ 0.lv: It’d be also great if you could share some details on the business side of things. In Project Haven, we wanted our characters to be unique, not only with their personalities but also with how they look. In terms of process, we build something, evaluate it, and eventually refine it until it reaches a level of quality we’re happy with.

Like many things in the game, the character and the city design process have been highly iterative. With Project Haven and its city surrounded by a plasma shield, and with no means of escape for the player this fits the sense of entrapment, and needing to face the impact this has. As for the city, it was important to us that players felt part of an oppressive, dystopian world, where characters are forced to deal with or accept challenging situations. That said, we also wanted to have a little bit of sci-fi/cyberpunk flair throughout the game to allow us to tell our particular story. Joana: Thanks! The art style really draws from movies that inspired us, as we wanted the game to be fairly grounded, not only in terms of its gameplay but also in its aesthetic. So, in this instance, that’s through a combination of cognitive science and game design both of which are big passions of mine.Ĩ0.lv: Please tell us about the game’s art style? How did you form it? How did you approach character design and create the game’s city? I’ve always wanted to expand my knowledge in this field, especially when it comes to improving how computer characters enhance a player’s experience. in Computer Science with a specialization in artificial agents, after finishing my Master's degree in Psychology. I then went on to work on several other titles throughout the 2000s, eventually joining the VFX company Video Copilot in 2009 as their Technical Director, where I had the chance to work on all sorts of titles. Sérgio: I left college to pursue my dreams of working in the games industry back in 1999, on a game called Tactical Ops that launched way back in 2001. Hey! We are Sérgio Gil and Joana Dimas, a couple from Portugal with different but complementary work backgrounds.

Where did you study? What companies have you worked for? What projects have you contributed to?

Project haven moba