Over the years we achieved one of our visions: building a very talented and eclectic team, that works on our projects and develops games with passion and love.
During the process, though, we realized that there is common skill that characterize many of us: we are artisans and even if the development of video games is a digital art, we enjoy using our hands to produce also physical items.
That is why our Concept Artists usually draw on paper as much as on digital tablets. Therefore, especially during the pre-production phase of a new project, they produce a huge amount of pencil sketches that are evaluated to identify the right style and mood. Then, only part of them are finalized in a digital form and all the others are usually archived in thick document folders for future references.
And what about the first prototype of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle? When we found out about the opportunity to develop a game in partnership with Nintendo, our Creative Director and the whole Game Design team unleashed their creativity in an epic brainstorming session. From that, various ideas surfaced but the turn based strategy one was quickly recognized as the most interesting and a prototype was needed to delve into it.
Unfortunately, all the Gameplay Programmers were busy on another project so our Game Designers decided to develop a cardboard one, drawing the game grid on top, creative tiny paper boxes to use as covers and small Rabbids figurine as playable characters.
With that board game-like version of the prototype, they started to draft the rules of the game, including the structures of the turns and the various abilities of the heroes, in an analog way and without writing a single line of code.