Get to know your indie #2 — KEO by Redcatpig
Get to know your indie #2 — KEO by Redcatpig
Welcome to number two of our “Get to know your indie” series, a series of blog posts where we present an awesome indie studio and its latest creation. Today we bring you an indie studio from the Azores, Portugal called Redcatpig and the creation is KEO, “a team-based online multiplayer vehicle combat game set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world”.
I had a super interesting talk with Marco Bettencourt, the CEO, and founder of Redcatpig about the ins and outs of what it means to build an indie game like KEO. For starters, Marco is a gamer since a very young age, he presented himself in the interview with an Atari 2600 jacket which was a coincidence because it was with this very console that he started his gaming years: “I felt really comfortable playing, to surpass those daily objectives, and I went by all generations naturally, after the atari times, there was the NES, Master Systems and so on…”. From an avid gamer to a professional in the gaming industry… in spite that he has some basic knowledge that could be helpful on the more technical side of redcatpig, Marco is in charge of all things besides the technical aspects, as the CEO he does that job of spreading the brand, getting funds and all things related to the growth aspect of the company, nonetheless he feels blessed to be working on a video game since 2017 and this is his first job in the industry. Marco said something that warms my heart not only because I agree with him, but also because I think is true: “I love working in this industry because almost everyone doesn’t see each other as competitors, we are always learning from others, we call them colleagues, and there’s a great capacity by this industry to accept more and more people, and to pass knowledge and to network”.
Now, let’s focus on Redcatpig… How did the idea/willingness to create Redcatpig come about? Marco answered me this way: “it started as a joke… me and the other two founding members we start to joke and try to learn things to make a video game, this were the first steps of KEO before Redcatpig existed”; “after this, I decided to close a marketing digital company that I had and with the other two guys that were playing with the future KEO project at home, we decided to go for it and we just did it!” After this, came the funding part of the business. Marco had a slightly different approach to what one usually does to get funds to build a video game, instead of looking at his newly formed team as a future gaming studio, he looked at it as a startup and we went to startup events instead of gaming events exclusively. For example, thanks to WebSummit we could get half of all the funds that we got at that time, so, we saw some potential in it and we just went with it… next came some prizes that we won with the game like “Playstation Talents” that just gave us more and more willing to build the game and because of that we created the studio Redcatpig”! Next, I want to tell you the story behind the studio name because you got to know it… So Marco and his colleagues were with a fully formed video game studio and with the idea of a video game way advanced and already with a name, but… no name for the studio. One friday night Marco said to his colleagues João Toste and Bryan Freitas, “listen, we are going to go out, get some drinks on us, clear our heads, and at this exact time (he didn’t remember the exact hours) we will sit down and the three of us are going to say a word with three letters in english; we sat at that time and one of us said, “red”, the other “cat” and the other one “pig” and well… that’s it”. If it isn’t the best way to name a video game studio, I don’t know what that is.
On to the challenges, not the ones that Marco was telling me about, those that he liked to surpass when he was just a gamer, on to the ones that come from the adventure that is the creation of an indie game studio and on top of that in Portugal… this is true because as Marco put it “when we created the studio, there wasn’t an economic activity code for our activity, so, it tells us that the portuguese government didn’t recognize our area of expertise as something professional, but something universal, is the funding part. The sentiment of, I am working on a game for more than two years and I don’t know if it will bring money and I still have to pay my bills at the end of the month is a constant concern for jobs like this one”. On top of that these guys from Redcatpig are super ambitious… picture this: for the first game they went for an online, multiplayer with a high graphic performance video game! “We checked all those “what you can’t do on your first game boxes” and we did it anyway, but at the end of the day it pays off, we are more than happy with KEO that it’s still in early access and we didn’t have to “sold our soul to any publisher”, non of our investors were publishers, so we kinda deconstructed that myth that all indie games must be hooked to the wills of the publisher”.
For the next part of the talk, I tried to focus Marco’s attention on the process of making KEO, the video game that was the motor of origin for Redcatpig. As an indie project of such scale, I was curious to know what were the steps to its creation and development. Marco said, “first of all this crazy thing that we did, it came with a lot of opportunities to learn and that was what bring more value to the game to this day, to a level of how will I put the physics working, how we will optimize the game, how we will design the lobby and the way for the players to choose the maps and cars and other things…; next up, and because this is an online multiplayer game, I asked them about in which phase of process they started to think about ways to control toxicity and cheaters: “KEO is a good game for that kind of activities, yes, and from the beginning, we saw that we had to look to that field to a tremendous seriousness, and all of that began in the discord channel way before the first times that the game could be played! Then we started the public tests and we saw right away that we were going to do something about it! (…) solutions that prevent that kind of situation are fundamental to protect our and others’ gaming communities”.
KEO is a great adventure and I loved talking about it with Marco, we talked about one of the greatest moments in the history of KEO, “it was when we won the Playstation Talents award for Best Game and Best Online Game, not when I received the awards at the gala but when I arrive at the Azores airport and João and Bryan were waiting for me!”, through this story I can tell that this is a passionate team lead by a very passionate guy, Marco!
For that reason, I asked him, in this line of work what gets you up in the morning? Well, “two major things: the fact that I have an awesome team, I love the people that I work with, and the fact that I worked in something that gives me the ultimate pleasure! To sell fun is something extremely interesting and that for me is marvelous!”
Redcatpig is doing more than just KEO, they have specialized teams in other fields such as animation, game dev, and others that are contracted by other studios or companies to help them in these areas of expertise, on top of that they are currently opening a new office in Madeira, another portuguese island on something that will be a Gaming HUB on the island! KEO is always evolving and is now going through the process of changing physics and we will have some news on when the full release will be, sooner or later!
Me and Marco finished this conversation with his words for people that want to start their own game or video game studio: “it’s difficult as sh*t!! ahahah! BUT, it’s one of those things that after will give a tremendous satisfaction! It has a correlation between satisfaction at the end with how difficult it is at the beginning. If this is a passion for you, it will be rewarding! (…) you gotta have a startup mentality, prepare your studio as if it will be the next Uber or the next Barkin, for you to get funding, go to events, not only gaming events but other startup events for you to show your brand with maturity and everything will come!”
From us at Anybrain, thank you Marco for this amazing conversation, and to all of you that are reading this blog post, try to play KEO!