Second Gate Games

When we first contacted Second Gate Games and asked them to collaborate with us, we were a little intimidated by their success on Kickstarter, and thus, did not have too high expectations.
Fortunately, the team behind Second Gate Games is very humble about their success, and liked our idea so much, that they have agreed to join our cause to support small publishers all around the world.
Moreover, the team from Second Gate Games, also gave us plenty of feedback and advice, which made Aroshops what it is today – without their help, things would have definitely been harder.

Why have you decided to create your own game?

Our first game (B-Sieged) was born as a crazy idea to dedicate ourselves to while we were between projects in our post-production video design agency (Dracma3d). We had lots of fun with designing the game and our design heritage helped to make it a wonderful product. We had no idea about marketing a game, though, so we licensed the game out to CMON. While they ran a successful campaign, we never felt our game got the attention it deserved, so we decided to start our own independent small publisher for future games. Monster Lands and Cactus Town are our first independent creations.

What interest you the most about developing games/ and what not?

The creation part is fun, but the business of running a publisher and communicating with the players is also very rewarding. Games are our hobby (as players) and publishing games has become a very nice (though badly paying) job. What do we not like about developing games? The logistics side of it, it can be tedious and right now the global shipping crisis makes it a nightmare.

Tell us about the funniest failure or situation that you had as a developer.

We had a raffle among about 1000 backers as part of one of our KS campaigns. We carried out the raffle draw in our office, but noticed we had made a mistake in the database. So we repeated it, replacing the winner of the first (incorrect) draw. When we communicated the final raffle winner to the backers, there was a single person making a comment on the draw (congratulating the winner)… and that person was THE WINNER OF THE INCORRECT DRAW! It was extremely eery, out of 1.000 people the only person to react was actually the one we had “rejected” as winner because of our own database mistake. We saw this as a sign of fate, and sent him a reward anyway.

If you had to play only three games for the rest of your life, which games would these be?

Kingdom Death Monster, Race for the Galaxy, Through the Ages. All masterpieces of designer creativity.

What makes your game/games unique?

Running a design agency in parallel, ARTWORK/DESIGN is part of our DNA. Our aim is for this to show, we want consumers to say “what a beautiful game”, so we invest a lot of time and money into artwork development and the polishing of details. That’s not to say that we don’t strive for gameplay excellence as well 😉

What was the best moment you had as a game developer?

Our Kickstarter campaigns. They are an extreme adrenaline rush, and the final hours are a super climax.

You want to sell your games in Germany. Why do you think Germans will like your game in particular?

We have been to Essen Spiel as exhibitor various times and its participation was extremely rewarding, with great feedback from the German (and international) audience. It might help that one of us is actually German, too 😉  Also, Germany is the 2nd biggest audience in our Kickstarter campaigns, only after the US.

Games sold: Monster Lands; Cactus Town; Lone Ranger; Cat Box; Kitty Paw;