We recently did a brief interview with Will Glow The Wisp dev Nikolas Crisci. We talked about his game and the challenges that he faced along the way, and his thoughts about the progress of Indie game development.
*The Interview has been edited for better understanding*
How did Part Time Indie come about? Are you a One Man Army or do you have a team?
PartTimeIndie was created to make an unfinished CCG called Era. It was my first try to make an indie game. After some point I noticed that the project was too big for me alone and I decided to rethink my strategy. Afterwards I started to prototype smaller games that I could achieve. Will Glow the Wisp was by far the most promising prototype. I had a little help with the Logo of the game and company and the achievements. I also used royalty free music and adjusted sounds from a unity asset for the SFX. Rest of it was all done by yours truly
What inspired you to create Will Glow The Wisp?
After the failed card game I looked at what type of genres I could do myself. I did just play super meat boy at the time and it did felt like something i could finish. So I created a prototype with the same fast respawn mechanism but in an abstract setting with a free flying character. The first prototype went very well so I decided to go ahead and do the game.
The Soundtrack of the game is amazing. Would you say a lot of thought went into the games music?
As I said before most of the soundtrack is royalty free music, freely available on the internet. That does not mean that no thought went into it though. I spent days searching for the right music for the game. There is also one track which is an original made by from my local game dev community. I was also contacted by a lot of other musicians, but I was happy with the music as I felt it fit in well with the game.
Do you believe that in recent years it’s been a struggle for Indie games to carve out a niche for themselves in an era of graphical prowess and the emergence of the Xbox One and PS4?
Any new Indie dev is bound to have his back against the wall. This is probably due to a multitude of reasons , but perhaps the major one is resources. The PS4 and Xbox One have in my opinion been beneficial for Indie devs as they have forced them to be innovative. I think that we live in a great time where a lot of people have the power to make their own games and distribute them. We are now entering an era, where it is getting harder and harder to gain traction and a playerbase for your game. But that is just a sign that we as an industry are maturing.
What are your plans for the future?
For now I am thinking about where to port Will Glow the Wisp and I am also starting to prototype new game ideas. There is nothing concrete yet, but it will not be another platformer I will be glad to share something, once I have more concrete plans.
