GB Feature: Troika Games Interview

We’ve conducted an interview with Troika Games’ Leonard Boyarsky, in which the developer provides some insight as to what caused the shuttering of the RPG studio. An excerpt:

GB: Was there any interest in your post-apocalyptic tech demo? If you don’t mind me asking, what sort of pitch/demo were you doing with the Half Life 2 engine?

Leon: We had some initial interest in our post apocalyptic game, but it was felt that it would have taken too long a dev cycle to develop the engine and then the game. We were hoping to do it in conjunction with another project with the same publisher to offset the development costs of the engine, but that deal fell through somewhere in the executive realm of the company we were talking to. The strangest thing for us was that we were in contact with a lot of development people who really wanted to work with us producers, etc, but marketing and the execs are real wary of RPGs.

We had two different demos we did with the HL2 engine. One was post apocalyptic and the other was more contemporary, kind of a follow up to Vampire (in terms of game mechanics, etc, but not the license) where we focused on what worked in Vampire and threw away what didn’t.