Get to Know Your Indie #4 - Soul of Ankiril by Tambù
Welcome to number 4 of our “Get to Know Your Indie” series, where we present an awesome indie studio and its latest creation. Today, we bring you a studio from Milan, Italy called Tambù, and the game that we will be talking about is Soul of Ankiril, a “strategic card game in which players will embrace alchemic forces to summon powerful creatures and challenges on the battlefield.” Soul of Ankiril started as a board game and will now get its digital version.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Andrea Perego, CTO of Tambù and co-creative director of Soul of Ankiril, about what it’s like to bring a card game to the digital world and create the video game section of a company that, up until now, specialized in building board games.
ANDREA AS A GAMER
Andrea has been a gamer since he was young, he started playing PS2 and then moved to PSP and PS3 before becoming a PC gamer. Andrea, however, is not your typical PC gamer: he doesn’t play classic AAA games; he focuses on indie games. Andrea explains his reasons:
“I am going full-on indies because I believe that in indie games, you can find something that provides you with a new experience. It’s the type of game that can push new ideas around things that normally wouldn’t work. Most of the AAA have to play safe, and as such, are more of the same.”
Soul of Ankiril is the first video game that Andrea has worked on. It was a challenge that he accepted from the CEO of tambù, and he couldn’t be more invested in it.
AN INDIE CARD GAME
Regarding Soul of Ankiril, I asked Andrea about building an indie card game because it is something you don’t see every day. The idea started to come around the offices of tambù around 2018.
“We did some very initial work on the game, but we stopped because it was consuming too much time and resources for the ones that we had at the time, but the game was born because everyone at tambù felt that there were no card games strategic enough to be played and enjoyed (…) You have Hearthstone, which is not that strategic, and Magic: The Gathering, which is super strategic and also very complex to play on a mobile device. We wanted to build something in between those two.”
An auspicious project from an indie studio, and that’s exactly where I personally see the value of indie studios: they take risks and chances to create something that has never been tried out of fear that it might not go well.
But not everything is a sea of roses for indie studios — there are some challenges. Andrea explains:
“By making something different, you will inevitably face a lot of challenges, a lot of new and undiscovered things, and this is the major challenge: to create something new that no one has done before you, you need to carefully think how to execute it, how to make it work. It’s a really, really hard task (…) And of course, for us, it is our first video game project, so it’s also a lot of learning about a new industry and how to make a whole new product in tambù.”
Soul of Ankiril has been in the making for quite some time now. Andrea has not been in the project since the beginning, but he tells me that the first step in building this card game happened between 2016 and 2018. These were the busy years of creating.
“Where the idea was created, mechanics (…) basically the building stones of what Soul of Ankiril would become and the videogame part, started in 2021, where we started to understand all the things that we would need to build a game of this genre that people would enjoy.”
In 2022, they started a Kickstarter campaign for the tabletop version of the game, and, in the meantime, a digital demo to start experiment for the videogame. The game is now in open early access on Playstore and Testflight. They are working hard on the app and going to release a new big update in the coming weeks. The official release will be in 2024, with multiple expansions on the horizon, as all online multiplayer free games should have.
CHEATERS AND TOXICITY ON BUILDING A GAME
Soul of Ankiril hopes to become a competitive game. Because of that, they considered the problems of cheaters and toxicity since the beginning of the development process.
“We decided to go with Anybrain because it goes further than the traditional security systems because we need to be safe on this side. We have a lot of server-side security, and Anybrain comes when we want to analyse the player behavior inside the app and, in that way, make it easier for us to target bad actors inside our app. In multiplayer games, it’s extremely important to ensure that every player is playing at the same level and with justice.”
As I’ve written above, Andrea is a proud builder of this game and should be. However, I also had to ask him about not only the good moments but the bad moments of this adventure. The first thing that he said to me is that at tambù, they build this game,
“Playing hard mode in a sense. So, we faced a lot of challenges, like having a problem, smashing your face against a wall to try and think of some way to solve those problems, or having more technical limitations. Those were the really bad moments, moments that were associated with our inexperience.”
The good things outweigh the bad, though:
“When you’ve put so much effort into something, making so many changes and seeing it evolving and becoming more and more like something that you actually love and enjoy (…) It’s amazing how we managed to do it; it’s a great feeling.”
WHAT IS NEXT FOR TAMBÙ AS A VIDEO GAME STUDIO?
When I asked Andrea what’s happening next for tambù, he replied:
“We are looking into a lot of technologies to upgrade our games, such as AI, to allow us to make something really magical and beautiful. So, the future is creating more indie games. Probably something smaller compared to Soul of Ankiril. We want to get tambù acknowledged as a good video game studio company.”
HOW DO YOU SEE THE FUTURE OF INDIE GAMES IN A WORLD OF BIG CONGLOMERATES?
Andrea has been playing only indie games since 2014, so he answered this question with great enthusiasm. He truly enjoys indie games not just for playing them in between playing AAA games but because he loves and invests in this part of the industry. In his opinion,
“Indie games are the ones that give me new and challenging experiences, different from any other games, different from AAA games because they cannot do it because they always play safe with some mechanics that we have seen somewhere else. Another thing is the feeling of joy by playing and completing an indie game that I don’t feel with AAA. I will try Starfield, but I am sticking with indie games. I think that indie will have a space among big competitors. They are the innovative force of the industry, and they show AAA what they can do better, so they can always co-exist.”
IN THIS LINE OF WORK WHAT GETS YOU UP IN THE MORNING?
For Andrea, the best part of working is the creative aspect — the sense of joy he feels by making something for others to experience and enjoy so much that they want to know more about world-building and setup. That’s the main thing that makes him get up in the morning, and it’s particularly important because, in his words, “working in the gaming industry and developing a game is really, really hard.”
Soul of Ankiril is now in close beta, and you can find the game on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.tambu.soa&hl=en_US and TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Pg5m6FSF .
Join Soul of Ankiril discord server: https://discord.gg/E98UnJjY7J
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If you liked this interview and want to discover more indie games, check out other articles in our Get to Know Your Indie series: We the People by Small Indie Company and KEO by Redcatpig.