HITS

Perforce’s Hansoft application for planning and collaboration makes game development a whole lot easier for the creative teams working on those titles, Johan Karlsson, product manager at Perforce Software, said Sept. 7, during the webinar “How Rogue Sun Accelerates Agile Game Development with Hansoft.”

Among other things, Hansoft, available for Linux, OSX and Windows, improves efficiency and collaboration for remote team, shaves days off of tasking out sprints, monitor progress and keep projects on track, streamline planning and operations, and accelerate development to realize their creative vision, according to Perforce.

Karlsson, who has an engineering and development background, is responsible for Hansoft’s international customer base and Helix Swarm, and labels himself a “backlog nerd” who has the ambitious goal of bringing Agile and “lean principles into modern enterprise environments,” according to Perforce.

Joining him during the webinar presentation were Chris Brooks, senior producer at game developer Rogue Sun, and Kostas Zarifis, Rogue Son, CEO and founder.

The creatives at Rogue Sun, an indie game studio founded in 2016 by some of the developers of the Fable series,  “prides themselves” for crafting “artisanal” interactive entertainment, according to Perforce.

The studio’s latest multi-platform game release, Tin Hearts, is an elaborate puzzle adventure that Perforce said is being praised for its story and immersive worldbuilding.

“To focus on innovation and creativity while building a game on a tight timeline, Rogue Sun uses Hansoft,” according to the companies.

The new title is “capable of being played” using virtual reality (VR) and PC and… your experience is going to be roughly the same no matter which platform you play on,” Brooks said. “We’re not remaking it ground up for VR in the way that you think a lot of titles are. They’re completely different experiences. This is effectively the same and that comes with its own challenges as well.”

Diving deeper into the development process, Karlsson asked why the developer decided to publish the title on such a wide variety of platforms and whether that was always part of the production process.

“Our goal is to get our games into as many hands as possible … for commercial reasons and creative reasons,” according to Zarifis. We want as many people as possible to experience our products. And that will make sense for some games. It won’t make any sense for other games.”

But he conceded: “We knew it was going to be a challenge…. You have to be ready when you take on a challenge like this. We’re, targeting platforms with vastly different capabilities and vastly different UX as well. You have to be prepared for the challenges and keep calm because you know we will encounter issues, which we did. And I’d like to think we tackled [them] every time.”

Karlsson pointed out: “The game is out there, and it’s well received. That’s a good sign of a good job done.”

Brooks went on to point to what is perhaps the secret sauce for why his studio’s games tend to turn out so well: “Everyone is encouraged to communicate with everyone else. There [are] no strict reporting lines. And I think the main benefit that we get from that is that things are actually very efficient. We get a lot done with quite a small team of people. Whereas I see in larger studios, you have strict reporting lines. You wait for certain meetings, and you end up wasting a lot of time essentially. We try to avoid that as much as possible.”