During our time in Portugal for DevGAMM earlier this week, we had the wonderful opportunity to catch up with developer Licht Hund, where we spoke with the team about their upcoming and anticipated project Rockbeasts. This is a management RPG where you play the leader of a rockband and have to navigate the complex and competitive waters of the music industry in the hopes of making it big and becoming a rockstar.
Talking about the idea behind the project and where Licht Hund's inspiration for it came from, creative director and CEO Bartosz Pieczonka told us the following:
"Oh, it was a very long journey. We wanted to make a game about music, we wanted to make a game about kind of becoming a rockstar and what it means and what it means to chase your dreams. And we wanted to have it from a perspective not of a musician but of someone who's actually in charge of the band. So, we felt like a manager is an exciting point of view for that."
Pieczonka continued with: "We were also playing around with mechanics, like we enjoyed games like Papers Please when there's a lot of kind of mechanical stuff but also like this moral choices and consequences of their action. And that's kind of how we started playing around with the idea of doing a management game and kind of grew from there. We started adding more kind of choices, building the narrative. And it took us a lot of time, it took us six years and I think just the first three years we were kind of figuring out what this game is going to be and how we're going to tell the story and what it's going to be about."
Composer and audio designer Marcin Sonnenberg then chimed in when asked about the musical themes and focuses for Rockbeasts, with him revealing that pop-punk bands served as much of the inspiration on this front.
"Yeah, so from the get-go we knew that the music will obviously play a huge part in the game. But it took us a while definitely to like nail the style in which we want to go. So at first we experimented a bit with like different genres of rock. But then we really focused on like the 90s sound and we really wanted to kind of anchor our game in that specific era.
"So we took clues from just your iconic 90s grunge bands and it is basically like one half of the soundtrack. And then you can influence your band to go in a different direction. So we also kind of did a half of the soundtrack that is much more influenced by pop-punk bands like Weezer, Green Day, so that sort of stuff. But it's, yeah, we really kind of, we felt that this is the right direction for the game. It also like meshed really great with the narrative, the art. And we really focused on that. And it was pretty smooth sailing from that point in terms of like knowing what direction we really want to go in."
There is currently no release date attached to Rockbeasts, but the game is being published by Team17 and will be coming to PC and consoles. For more on the project, be sure to watch our interview, with localised subtitles, below.
