Badgermein
"Hello
DysprosiumDy, and welcome to Web Weekly. Thank you
once again for taking the time out of your evening for
an interview. Could you start by introducing yourself?"
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DysprosiumDy
"Thank you for having
me! My name is Dys, I'm a Dutch indie game developer
and I've been working on web games for the past 14
years roughly. That'll give you enough to estimate
my age. (^_^;)"
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Badgermein
"That's
certainly a long time to be developing. Obviously, you
have a passion for it. How did Frostbolt Games come
into fruition?"
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DysprosiumDy
"When I started
studying Computer Science I met my best friend and
colleague Silicon. Back then I'd started work on my
biggest passion project called "Board Game Online" and
he loved it. Originally I started a business called
Dysprostar with another friend of mine (the legendary
player with player ID #1: Ishtar), but he left and Sil
and I founded Frostbolt Games to develop games together.
After our study we first went to work on Frostbolt Games
part time, but later on I went full time. Sil is still a
part time indie dev and has a job on the side."
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Badgermein
"I see, so Board Game Online
(BGO) predates Frostbolt's founding. The indie
development scene can certainly be challenging, and BGO
seems to have gained a lot of attention, not to mention
a dedicated player base. How would you describe BGO to a
new player?" |
DysprosiumDy
"BGO is a
multiplayer, rogue-like race to the finish line.
Turn-based, but with loads of actions you can perform
outside of your turns. It has a massive amount of
content, wacky humor and more references than you could
possibly dream of. You could play it a thousand times
and still no two games would be the same! Basically,
it's a must play for every true game fanatic out there.
It has more depth than almost any game I know."
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Of course, BGO has it's own
wiki, important for
understanding the vast amount
of items, classes, and game modes.
Badgermein
"BGO is certainly a
unique game with lots of different moving parts. At
first glance, I could feel that sense of chaos that
you've instilled into this game. But closer inspection
reveals a very fleshed-out, carefully crafted
experience. What was the inspiration for such a
project?" |
DysprosiumDy
"The original inspiration for BGO
actually goes way back! In highschool I taught myself
to do some basic programming on our calculators. The
first programs were very simple menu interfaces, but I
got inspired to create a multiplayer board game on it
that students could play by passing the calculator
around and taking turns. It had "Board Game" as its
working title and it actually became a hype at our
school! I freaking loved it that so many students
would play this silly turn-based game by passing their
devices around. I was extremely proud of it!
Years later when I quit my first
study (biology) I decided to go for my true passion of
creating games and started Computer Science. A friend
of mine mentioned "Board Game" and told me I should
make an online version of it. And that same summer I
drove around France for the summer holidays and spent
a lot of my time concepting what this "Board Game
Online" would look like. I had downloaded a full
reference of the JavaScript language and tried to
teach myself to code.
One year later and the very first
version of BGO was a reality! Two friends of mine,
twins studying at the art academy, made the original
art for the game. Later on, our current artist Yel
Zamor became the main developer and fleshed out BGO's
art style. Yel's amazing! <3"
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A much earlier version of
BGO.
Badgermein
"BGO is truly a
passion project, exemplified by you and your team's
dedication to it's development all these years later.
BGO remains your most popular project, and you really
seem to have struck gold with it. I imagine this story
is inspiring for all of those small-time indie
developers out there (heck, I know I'm inspired). What
are some challenges you've faced with the development
process?" |
DysprosiumDy
"The biggest
challenge is the one I recommend every aspiring game
developer to overcome. When we first started working on
BGO, for the first year we had pretty much no players.
Very rarely we'd have 2 concurrent players and we'd be
very excited. But overall it was pretty dead. Even
though we loved the concept and thought it had a lot of
potential, we lost the will to work on it. I was lucky,
because Sil asked me if he could work on it. If it
weren't for him, we might've let the project die then
and there.
"Not long after that, our server crashed when we had a
sudden influx of players from a website called
EpicMafia. It only took 50 concurrent players to melt
our servers, but after some quick adjustments we could
bring the servers back online and I was amazed to see so
many players online!It only took one player to share the
game with another community to breathe life into BGO.
"And from that day forward, BGO has always had players
and an awesome community! <3 So the biggest challenge
was finding the will to commit even when your project
isn't kicking off just yet. When you know that your game
is great, keeping working on it. Too many game devs
start something, then quit and repeat that until they're
burned out. It takes commitment to keep at it! All other
challenges pale in comparison, to be honest." |
Badgermein
"Certainly, some
advice to take to heart. Besides BGO, Frostbolt's other
projects have also looked fun in every sense of the
word. In particular, I personally enjoy Catamancer's
look and gameplay. Looking at your Game Skinny
interview, that was so long ago, around the time the
kickstarter began for that project I believe. Is BGO the
main project that Frostbolt is focused on at the
moment?" |
Inside an average BGO game.
DysprosiumDy
"Yes. We're very proud of
Catamancer. We coded our very own web development
library and tools and wanted to put them to the test.
Catamancer was a type of game that was almost
impossible to make using HTML and JavaScript, which
made it an amazing challenge. And right now it plays
well, has smooth graphics and doesn't feel like a web
game at all!
"Unfortunately it's a dead project currently, because
the market for Collectible Card Games is
oversaturated. I do think the game still has serious
potential to become a popular card game, but as a
2-person team we simply cannot spread ourselves thin
and BGO has already proven itself.We're still very
proud of our in-house game development framework and
have been expanding it over the years. It now has
capabilities that we haven't yet used in new game
projects. For example, we've ported our code to
NodeJS, allowing us to use it to code on the server
side as well as the client side. This means that we
can very easily create multiplayer games now that work
in real-time. For example, games like the popular
slither.io and agar.io
"And while we do have various cool projects we've been
concepting and building in the background, BGO is
still our main focus. Especially because we now have a
new direction to steer BGO in thanks to our new bot
technology, allowing players to play against
computer-controlled opponents!Our next big step for
BGO is very likely to be a sort of rogue-like
adventure where players face opponents and collect
weapons and upgrades over the course of multiple
games. We have some very big plans for this!"
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Badgermein
"Wow, it certainly sounds like
there is plenty to look forward to! Undoubtedly, BGO
fans are looking forward to these big plans. The
Frostbolt framework your team has developed sounds
very promising as well. Before we wrap this up, how
would one show support for these big plans? Surely, as
passionate as you are, we all know that indie devs
cannot work for free."
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DysprosiumDy
"The first and most important way
to show your support is by simply playing our games.
We don't have any ads and we don't force anyone to pay
to play. But by simply being there and keeping the
game active you're really supporting us! Never ever
feel bad about being unable to help us out
financially. <3
For those who are willing and able,
you can make a donation to BGO
and unlock many skins and other fun rewards. And if
you'd love to support us over time, then becoming a
patron on Patreon
helps us immensely! We funnel all this income into our
games and the more we earn, the more we can do!
For our bigger plans, like the
whole new game mode involving bot opponents, we'll
likely do another crowdfunding campaign. This will
possibly be on Kickstarter once more. And for those
who are able to donate €500 to Board Game Online, it's
good to know that you can then join us to design your
very own item for the game! It still amazes us how
many players have supported us for that amount. It's
incredible and I urge everyone to look at this huge
list of items designed by players:
(https://www.boardgame-online.com/?page=donator_items)."
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Badgermein
"Thank you once again for your
time, DysprosiumDy. Good luck in your future
endeavors."
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DysprosiumDy
"It was a pleasure to do this
interview! Game development is my passion and being
able to talk about BGO like this... it makes my heart
pound with excitement! Thank you!
( ▀ ͜͞ʖ▀)"
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