Australian indie game development collective, League of Geeks, today announced its debut title: Armello. The game is a “natively-digital card and board game set in a fairy-tale animal kingdom,” and will be released for tablet devices in 2013.
The announcement trailer is certainly pretty, but doesn’t give much of an indication of gameplay. The press release states that “Armello will be completely 3D, with beautifully animated visuals, an expansive meta-game and vast amounts of content. Boasting AAA production values, it will be free to play, with an economy model based on core free-to-play games such as League of Legends.” Aside from that all we know at this stage is the overarching set-up: the king of the land has gone insane and four animal clans are competing to claim the crown.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the announcement is League of Geeks’ business model. The 15-strong team are working for a share of the profits, with no upfront payment. It’s an interesting concept, and means the game can be made for a fraction of the cost. At a significant risk, of course.
“It sounds crazy,” says League of Geeks’ Director, Blake Mizzi, “but we actually spent the first six months building the right legal and organisational structure. We wanted to do something really ambitious without taking on conventional investment and restricting our freedom. It was critical to get the setup watertight so developers would have confidence in it and it wouldn’t all fall apart if there were any disputes or someone left.”
Director Trent Kusters adds, “Since then, we’ve been able to attract an amazingly talented group of people who have been inspired by the vision for both the game and what we’re hoping will be a new model for enabling indie developers to tackle more ambitious projects. We want to be very open along the way and plan on providing our model to any other indie developers out there that want to follow our approach.”
The team is now 12 months into development and has received funding from both Screen Australia and Film Victoria. It's going to be very interesting to see Armello in action!
Source : ign[dot]com
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