At Indie Ranger, we recently reviewed Founders’ Fortune. We wanted to ask the developers about how their game has gone with the Steam release and what they plan for the future.
Why did you decide to make Founders’ Fortune?
The story of Founders’ Fortune goes back to one of Ponzel’s train rides while he was still studying. He was talking to a friend about how simple cartoon sketches can already convey a lot of emotions. Just a few lines in a smiley face can give you a very good idea about a character’s feelings. This little
conversation motivated him to experiment with simple (Minecraft-like) 3d models that lived together in a small village.
Over the time Ponzel was no longer satisfied with he looks of his little prototype and reached out to one of his best friends, RobotK, to help him with game art. Together we walked the long path from this first prototype to the game that Founder’s Fortune is today.
What would you say makes Founders’ Fortune different from other colony survival games?
The biggest difference would be the focus on the colonists They all have expectations, meaning that they want to reach a certain standard of living while constantly coming up with new wishes. As you can see we’re going a bit in the Sims direction here.
How has your Steam release gone at this point?
So far we’re very happy with Founder’s Fortune’s release. There haven’t been any serious bugs and the game seems to be running smoothly on most players’ PCs. Especially the positive reviews and the tons of feedback are very motivating!
What future plans do you have for the game?
When it comes to features that we’d love to implement, we have a very long list of cool stuff. The roadmap that we put on our website and on our Steam page gives you a good overview. In the end, what we can implement highly depends on how much money we make with the game. It is too early
to say anything yet though.
Have you made any smaller games?
Yes, we’ve had a few projects before but never ended up releasing them anywhere. Two examples: We were working on a survival game like Rust or Ark way back in 2012. We were both still in high school and had next to no experience. Ponzel developed his own engine and managed to make it work in multiplayer, while RobotK made his first steps in 3d modeling. Of course, it was way to much work for the two of us at the time. Another bigger project was Clans in Conflict, a first-person real-time strategy game. We used the Unreal Engine 4 this time and managed to make it look kinda cool. Still, we weren’t experienced enough to make the gameplay interesting, while also creating enough content. Some pictures are on our forum.
These projects gave us the experience we needed and made Founders’ Fortune possible.
Would you say that working full time on the game has been beneficial?
Working on Founders’ Fortune full time has definitely helped us bringing the game to a new level. If you compare Alpha 8 to Alpha 4 which we released end of January you can really see how much has changed over the course of five months.
Do you plan to hire more staff or keep it as a duo team?
We plan to keep our team as small as possible. We might reach a point when we really need a few additional team members but that will surely take quite some time.
We would like to thank the developers for sitting down with me and answering my questions. Please make sure to check out Founders’ Fortune on Steam and give the developers some support. You can also check out the roadmap for the game here.