Page 18 - spielbox 03/21 - English

Profile. 1 More Time Games
Play it, Baby, One More Time
Two friends, one dream: their own publishing house. Roman Rybiczka and Julian Steindorfer fulfilled their dream. Although they had many more hurdles to overcome than they had ever imagined. Playtesting alone for Riftforce, their first game, needed far more time than calculated. But it all paid off. Their first outing is so much more than just a respectable success.
By ANDREAS BECKER
A
nd then, right before the big start, the pandem- ic happened. Roman Ry- biczka’s and Julian Steindorfer’s entire schedule became – basically wastepaper. They had planned to launch the Kick- starter campaign for their first self-pub- lished game in May 2020, which was already ambitious. After the Nuremberg Toy Fair, with the pandemic looming on the horizon, the two fell ill in February, with hardly any time left. “We realized that we couldn‘t make it,“ Julian recounts. Riftforce still needed a lot of editorial work, at least another pass, maybe even two. But every change meant further con- sultations with designer Carlo Bortolini, illustrator Miguel Coimbra, and graphic designer Elena Anna Rieser. “It was all right,“ Julian says today, a year down the
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Julian Steindorfer (left) and Roman Rybiczka.
road. It was all right to take their time. Back then, the main issue was to bal- ance the cards so each guild would be equally powerful. “But the thing is, if you change one card, it affects everything else,“ Roman says. One little nuance can shatter the whole internal structure. In a large living or collectible card game with hundreds of cards, that would not matter so much. But Riftforce is more focused: There are ten guilds, each must get along with all the others. There just couldn‘t be
one wining combo.
I Time for game design
and campaigning
May became September. Months in
which energy was not only poured into game design, but also into the campaign. On Kickstarter, marketing is more than half the battle. It paid off that Julian Steindorfer once worked as creative di- rector. You can tell from the presentation that the two had a very clear idea about how they wanted Riftforce to come across. And the concept worked out. On Kickstarter updates, you can still see the first post with the small GIF loop. Rybiczka and Steindorfer in front of a laptop. When the campaign was unlocked, the commu- nity backed it and 100 supporters were on board in no time. The two friends from Vienna, now business partners, could not believe their luck. Their first own project: And it was taking off.
The decision to use Kickstarter also paid off in other ways. For one thing,
Photos: 1 More Time Games