Simon's blog

So by now, you’ve probably seen the trailer we released for our vacation project. For those of you that haven’t, you can head over to www.savantgame.com ooooooor just watch the trailer right here!

Stayed up for two days to put that trailer together.

As a result of the reveal, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about the game, and I thought I would address some of them here. We’re going to add some of these answers to the Savant Game website when we get closer to release. Now:

Why are you working on this game?

Me and the D-Pad Studio team have known Alex for a while now, long before he chose Savant as his label. We would randomly hang out and work on random projects, one of them being what became Vikings on Trampolines, and a few other things we’ve never shown to the public. I’ve also helped create a lot of his album covers. The first one being Vario, where I tried to create an image for the Savant label, and later I did the cover for Alchemist.

It all really came down to timing. Essentially, we had been working like crazy for who knows how long, and decided we needed a vacation. It just so happened that Alex was working on a new album. I was contacted and I ended up creating the new cover for Cult:

In the process though, we got into discussions about the various projects we had been experimenting on, and we came up with the idea of making an official game out of the Savant label. So in a nutshell, we decided that instead of taking some time to relax, we were going to work even more. I’m sure there’s a mental illness with our name on it, but at the very least we can’t be blamed for being lazy.

So how does this game play?

I suppose the game can best be described as a platform bullet hell. You control the main character by either rolling or jumping between two platforms, each providing a different way to avoid damage. As you kill enemies, you charge up you combo-meter which allows for a stronger burst attack. It’s a very simple game by all means, but then, it was supposed to be.

It’s passed the usual D-Pad quality test, in that Jo tends to forget that he was fixing and ends up playing the game itself. Works like a charm.

How big is this project going to be?

Our goal was to dedicate about a month of development to the title as not to hurt production of our other games. It’s a fun little romp filled with bullets and explosions that we thought people would enjoy, soooo we made it. We could be open do the idea of expanding this game in the future if it seems fun.  Oh, and speaking of our other games…

WHY ARE YOU NOT MAKING OWLBOY?!

We are. There’s a reason we’re very firm on calling this our vacation project because it really is our vacation before we jump back on Owlboy again. In fact, we’ve been working on Owlboy more or less every single day since it’s announcement, and we’re not stopping now.

There’s going to be some very fun Owlboy news on the horizon very shortly, but for now, we’ll let the Savant project have its moment to shine before we reveal what we’ve been tinkering with.

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If you have any other questions, just let me know. D-Pad Studio also has a tumblr now over at http://dpadstudio.tumblr.com/ where you can ask questions too.

Once we get closer to the game’s release, I’ll start releasing some of the concept art created for the game.