In this episode, Teri welcomes Jeferson Valadares, the CEO and Co-founder of Doppio Games, a voice-first game studio based in Lisbon, Portugal.
Welcome, Jeferson!
Jeferson was the lead designer on the studio's debut title “The Vortex”, available for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and smartphones. Before Doppio, Jeferson was the VP/GM of mobile at Bandai Namco, studio GM at Electronic Arts and executive producer at BioWare in San Francisco; Studio director at Playfish and creative director at EA Mobile in London; and game development director at Digital Chocolate's Sumea studio in Helsinki.
He has spoken many times at the Game Developers Conference and is an active member of the developer community. He is also one of the founders of IGDA Online Games SIG, and was involved in the publishing of their 2005 Mobile Games Whitepaper.
Background
- He’s been making games for 20 years and currently likes making games for voice platforms.
- He used to make mobile games and moved up in his profession to work with EA Mobile, Playfish, BioWare, and Bandai Namco. Eventually he branched out to start his own company, Doppio.
- He was always excited about interactive stories and voice was a great way to go into that.
- With voice entertainment being fairly new, he sees some creative and business opportunities there, which is how he started Doppio with his co-founder Chris Barnes.
- They released their first game, “The Vortex” on Alexa in 2018 just to see what the market was like.
- They got some investors and used the money to hire a bigger team and set up an office in Portugal.
- They released their second game, “The 3% Challenge” in 2019.
Negative Response From Traditional Gamers
- Traditional gamers look down on voice games because they prefer high quality graphics and other features; which voice doesn’t offer.
- That happens with every new platform, for example, when the first mobile phone came out, they were not meant for gaming but the minute they had a screen, they had the simple snake game. Today, mobile phone games are very advanced.
The Vortex
- When they started out, he learnt that when making games for a new platform, things don’t always work as well as expected.
- They didn’t want to do a “branchy” game so they designed the game to be where someone could say anything. They also wanted it to make sense to their target audience, so they settled on a sci-fi theme where the gamer wakes up from a cryofrozen state in a colonist ship. The person is conscious but their body is frozen, so all they can do is give orders to robots in the ship.
The 3% Challenge
- They wanted to do something different with this game by stretching things farther.
- They made it more of a conversational and social game where a gamer could interact with other people.
- It has both a story mode where a gamer goes through chapters depending on their choices and a branchy mode that is more conversational.
- They kind of developed the game with their audience because they applied a lot of what they learned from the analytics of how people spoke to the game and the words they said.
- They are working on releasing chapter 7 and 8 of the game.
Tips for Game Designers
- Watching and understanding what a platform is good for, and working with that is more advisable.
- An example with voice is how it evolves every few months.
- After watching a platform and figuring out what it’s all about, one can come up with a way to create something fun and interactive.
- He advises game developers not to obsess about copying successful games and focus more on creating something different.
List of resources mentioned in this episode
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