After having played ‘Rollers of the Realm’, I knew I wanted to do an interview with the developers as soon as possible. I reached out and contacted Ericka Evans and here’s the interview! Our side (TheGeniusInc) will be TGI and Ericka will be EE.

TGI: Who are you, what is your position at Phantom Compass and how long have you worked there?

EE: My name is Ericka Evans, I am Head of Production here at Phantom Compass and I’ve been here for two years.

TGI: What games have you enjoyed recently? EE: Candy Crush, Triple Town, The Room, Mega Run, Lego Batman and Lego Indiana Jones (my 4 year old son is a big fan). TGI: How long has Phantom Compass been in business? EE: Phantom Compass has been around for 5 years. That’s seven full time employees and a group of awesome contractors to fill our project needs. We run a distributed business with two small offices (in Toronto, Ontario and St. Catharines, Ontario). TGI: Phantom Compass has a large number of partnerships on your webpage. Does working in Canada and having access to these partners have a positive effect on company growth? EE: Having access to Canadian public funds like CMF Experimental Fund and the OMDC Interactive Digital Media Fund have provided much stability for the growth of Phantom Compass. TGI: When did work begin on ‘Rollers of the Realm’? EE: It started as a 2D prototype in November of 2011. Phantom Compass brought together a group of laid off AAA developers and artists to jam out a prototype that everyone could use for their portfolios. What we came up with was so awesome, Phantom Compass secured the funds to bring the full game to life in the Unity3d Engine. We have been working on that version since September of 2012. TGI: Where did the idea for ‘Rollers of the Realm’ come from? EE: Everyone involved in the prototype jam was allowed to pitch ideas, and we voted on which ideas to work on. One of our collaborators, Tom Beirnes, came to the table with ‘RPG Pinball” and everyone immediately said ‘That’s it!”. The Project Director, Dave Evans, created the characters and story world for the game. He is a storyteller at heart and really wanted to prove you can deliver a really good story through any genre of game, even RPG pinball.

TGI: The merging of Fantasy and Pinball is rather original, did this cause any setbacks during design?

EE: There haven’t been any setbacks, but it has given us a lot of fodder for creative ideas. Mapping pinball mechanics to the RPG and Fantasy conventions has been a lot of fun. For example, the pinball ’tilt’ mechanic has been re-imagined as an agility stat for our balls (which we call ‘nudge’). Different characters (represented as balls) have different strengths of ‘nudge’ and this is a stat you can upgrade by buying items in the trading port. Attaching health and damage to the pinball flippers and using the healer character to fix damage dealt by foes is another example of this marriage of Fantasy and Pinball.TGI: The pre-beta just started, any word on a final date? What about dates for Mac, Linux, Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Wii, iOS or Android versions?EE: We are hoping for this fall, but crazy things can happen! Can’t say anything for sure right now, in regards to other platforms or release dates. TGI: Because you’re doing a Pre-Beta, did Phantom Compass pass on the Steam ‘Early Access’ program or was it unavailable during development? EE: It simply wasn’t offered to us. TGI: How has the ‘Greenlight’ process been for your company? EE: Exciting and daunting. This is our first game we’ve tried to get onto Steam and so it’s been a new ride for us. We have learned a lot about our audience and received amazing feedback. We had lots of ‘Yes’ numbers while we were new and on the front page, but that flatlined after about a week– although we have gotten handfuls of pinball-RPG fans who found us while grazing ‘Greenlight’. We are grateful for the amazing supporters who found us and think our game is Awesome and deserves a chance, but the total number of ‘Greenlight’ users who have found us is still a tiny fraction. Since we are an unknown, smaller company with such a quirky game, odds aren’t exactly in our favor against well established developers or well known games. But with some hard work marketing our game, with websites like TheGeniusInc or the Greenlight Supershow (http://robotloveskitty.com/supershow/) and with friends telling friends to go out and vote for us (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136473033), we can keep the marketing beast fed.

TGI: Was the ‘Greenlight’ process successful for your company?