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The lead designer and the lead programmer over at Tessera Studios were glad to talk all things The Zibbo Show at the Madrid event's indie area, and here we discuss influences from the 70's television, roguelike deck builders, and a little bit of horror.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, I'm at the MAD Games Show in Madrid, taking a look at the interesting indie games gathered here, and I'm here joined by Pere and Victor to talk about The Zibbo Show, which is a roguelike deck builder.
How do you guys try to stand out among the, you know, roguelike deck builder craze?
Yeah, there's a lot of competition, but I think we set up in a kind of TV show, American TV show, that is, I mean, it's kind of horror, but it's not in your face horror, it's just a little bit subtle, so I think this is a bit different from other games in this genre."
"And there is some dice to it, what can you tell me about the sort of the mechanics we're going to deal with here to progress?
Okay, you play in a 3x3 grid, you place dices, you have 9 dices, you place dices in the columns, and if you place the same dice in the same column as your last dice, you multiply the score.
So you go on scoring points with the dices and multiply, but you can also destroy the dices of the enemy, because if you place the same number than the enemy in the same column, it gets destroyed."
"And then you have also cards and upgrades for the dices that make the game a little interesting because you build your deck maybe for threes or for different kind of strategies.
That's also the roguelike part. When you die in this game, you unlock new cards that in the next round you can use these new cards to make a different build."
"Maybe you go for pairs or unpairs or something like that, so you can change your strategy and try to beat the boss that killed you the last time.
Okay, tell me a bit more about the TV show lore and how you guys deliver the narrative here.
The narrative is very light, we don't want players to have to skip a lot of dialogue, but it's just the setting itself. You can see that something is missing, something is not quite right."
"It's not in your face, but it's subtle, and that's what we're trying to achieve.
What do those players tell you in terms of feedback when they play?
How do you get them hooked? Do they tell you it's addictive already, that it's working with them?
Yeah, we have players that played through the entire demo, that is four rounds, and it's about 20 minutes or something like that, and they were very engaged with the mechanics."
"I think they also play these kinds of games that are very in the moment right now, but yeah, the feedback that we're having right now is very good.
This is a kind of niche genre, but the fans of this genre completely understand it at the moment.
They see just a screenshot and say, oh, I get it now, I understand how you play."
"There's a small tutorial, but players understand it at the moment.
That's very interesting in terms of communicating the game to players.
All right, but you guys don't come from this niche. You've done pretty different things before this, so how did this come to be? How did you guys decide to go for this genre?
Is it a personal taste of yours? Is it trying to follow the trend?
Well, it came inside, how do you say that, a game jam inside of Tessera."
"So a month every year we try to make a game jam inside to new ideas or whatever, and this came out in the latest game jam.
But it was so fun and so right, I said we need to make it a full game, and that's what we're doing these last months."
"We're not close to one genre. We always try to look for new types of games.
It's just fun for us as developers to make different things, and everyone in the studio likes different kinds of games, so it's a bit good to have all the genres that we can make."
"Finally, what's the status of the project? Is it a vertical slice or a demo?
It's almost the full game. We're almost done.
We are only missing QA, basically, and we are doing a beta in some weeks to try to find more feedback from the game, but the game is almost finished."
"We're also focusing on QA and marketing right now.
Are you guys auto-publishing, or are you trying to...
Maybe if we find the publisher, perfect.
Exactly, for marketing, but right now we are alone with this game."
"Fantastic. Looking forward to throwing my dice here and learning about the quirky TV show background here.
Thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the show, and good luck.
Thank you."
