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From California to the Philippines with friendly goblins: The story of Orc Chop Games
12.03.2024 - 14:03 / gamesindustry.biz
Goblin Stone, the debut title from Orc Chop Games, has two stories behind it. The narrative of the game itself is of innocent goblins turning the tables on the adventurers that so frequently invade their home, inverting a typical fantasy trope.
The story behind the game, meanwhile, is one of a married couple forming a new studio on the success of their mobile zombie game and moving from the US to the Philippines.
Co-founders Vince and Susan McDonnell first hit was Zombie Farm, a mobile title they self-published under former studio The Playforge. The revenue it generated enabled Vince to pursue a long dreamed-of career in console games development, forming a new studio with Susan to make a different type of game.
"I was yearning to go back to creating console games because those are the games I enjoy," Vince McDonnell tells GamesIndustry.biz. "So we used what we earned from Zombie Farm to fund this venture."
Development for Goblin Stone — which releases on Steam today — began while the studio was still based in California, with Orc Chop Games truly taking shape after McDonnell reached out to a partner in Beijing to help build a development team. Orc Chop Games then relocated to the Philippines, settling in the country's capital Manila.
McDonnell highlights that setting up the studio in the Philippines came with its advantages, the most notable being the cost of labour.
"If we were to have this same personnel account [of 12 people] back when I was in San Francisco, that'd be much more expensive," he explains. "Here, we're able to have more people and more talent with the budget that we're constrained with which allows us to develop more and release the product sooner than we would have otherwise."
He also notes that studios like Orc Chop Games, ones that are working on their own IP rather than outsourcing, are hard to come by in the Philippines. But that helps with enticing talent to their studio.
"The studios you find here, the ones that people gravitate towards after they graduate, mostly do outsourcing for bigger companies like CD Projekt Red – there are a lot of studios here that cater to AAA studios like that. And because of that, there are groups of developers who want to work for companies similar to that, where they work on their own IP so we're able to capitalise on that kind of talent and induct them into our studio. And that's quite attractive for a certain group of people who have this dream."
That's not to say Orc Chop Games hasn't faced challenges in hiring. McDonnell says that VFX artists are surprisingly hard to come by, despite there being a lot of VFX artists for film in the area, among other constraints.
"Being a VFX artist [for games] isn't quite common here, unfortunately," he says. "So
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