Editor's Note: With our latest Dev Talk series, Three For, developers make a case for their upcoming release, with gaming history and industry trends considered. Acknowledging the busy market that is Steam and today's abundance in options, our questions invite developers to make a case for why their labor of love is worth what's in your wallet.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
1. There has got to be a story behind that name. 11Sheep?!
Yes, there is. I was hiking in Nepal and while all my friends got sick (height sickness) and I was the only one feeling good on the mountain, so I helped a local family with their sheep herd for a couple of days. Having so much fun, I decided that one day, should I open a gaming company, I would call it "11Sheep" after the family herd. (You can guess how many sheep were in that herd!)
Because we also develop games and apps for customers, we needed a unique name that people would remember. 11Sheep is doing a great job for that.
2. Millions of downloads on mobile...
Motivation enough to release on PC? Great! Now there are those who will argue a game is a game; the platform is but a technical detail. Die-hard fans of the PC platform, however, will contest. Where do you stand on the subject, and has that affected how you ported a mobile game onto the personal computer?
We had a very good reason to port our game, as it was originally a PC web game. I saw its mini demo on PC and thought it was a good idea to make a mobile game out of it because mobile is our expertise. So we invested lots of time to convert this game to mobile. Now, after the mobile success (4 million downloads), bringing it back to PC was trivial and easy, both technically and logically.
3. Making a funny game isn’t like making a funny movie. Would you agree?
I agree, and I think it's easier to make funny games. A/B testing a movie is hard! Our first version of the story was a little different, but getting feedback from our testers and users, we slightly changed the story and animations according to user feedback to make it more fun and funny to play. This is a privilege you can only get on video games, and not on movies.
Thank you, 11Sheep, for answering our questions!