Interview

The Big Indie Interviews: We talk adapting retro beat em ups for the mobile market with the G-STAR Big Indie Pitch winner ThinkBIT

We chat to the winner of the second Korean Big Indie Pitch which took place at G-STAR 2018

The Big Indie Interviews: We talk adapting retro beat em ups for the mobile market with the G-STAR Big Indie Pitch winner ThinkBIT

The Big Indie Pitch is a regular event run by the makers of PocketGamer.biz. It sees indie developers engage in a speed-dating-styled pitching competition for fame and those sweet, sweet promotional packages.

The event gives indies four minutes to pitch their games to a panel of press, publishers and industry pundits. The judges then pick three winners and everybody gets valuable feedback.

The indie view

The Big Indie Pitch is getting bigger and bigger as we bring it to events all across the world. To give you an idea of what the event is like, who attends the events and the games on show, we've sat down with a number of past BIP contestants to offer their views.

Our Big Indie Pitch at G-STAR 2018 Top 3

Today, we're speaking to Lord Gosingtian from ThinkBIT, who submited Brawl Quest to The Big Indie Pitch at G-STAR 2018 and walked away as the champion.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a little about yourself and your indie studio. Who is in the team and what are their inspirations?

Lord Gosingtian: Our studio was formed a year and a half ago and we have been focusing on working on client/outsource work since then. We eventually wanted to start building our own games to make a name for our own indie studio so we started brainstorming and working on some prototypes internally which led to Brawl Quest.

The team's inspirations are quite varied - ranging from different genres, platforms, and personalities. We find this a strong point as we always have several different references when we build games each of our interests and inspirations come from different sources.

Tell us about your latest project that you pitched at the competition.

Brawl Quest is a free to play mobile game that takes inspiration from those old arcade beat em ups like double dragon, streets of rage, golden axe. But what we did special with our game was optimize it for a casual mobile experience. One of the goals we had was that the game can be played with just one hand. The setting is heavily inspired by modern day Philippines and it's characters is inspired by Philippine pop-culture. The story is a semi-satirical view on modern day Philippine society where we generally poke fun of the bad things that happen everyday in a very light and comedic manner.

How hard is it to survive as an indie developer?

It is extremely hard to survive as an indie developer. We are trying to do some client work to be able to fund and develop our own games and eventually land a hit game. There are so many [financial] uncertainties when we hole up and start building our own game. We are trying our best to look for different avenues to support our existence as an indie developer and I actually consider ourselves to be very lucky to be able to have the opportunity to pitch at the Big Indie Pitch!

How was your experience pitching as a part of the Big Indie Pitch?

I found it a bit frightening at first since I personally do not have a lot of pitching experience but it ended up being a really fun experience. On top of that, I got great feedback from a lot of judges/industry veterans and it gave us really good qualitative data to work on.

What do you feel you have gained from these experiences and what do you still hope to gain?

I feel that we have gained better insight, and validation for our game. (I think) I have improved my pitching skills, haha. Hopefully, we will get a clearer direction along the way once we implement more stages and features of the game.

What are your hopes for this game in the future and do you have any plans for any future projects?

We are hoping to add more content and more features as we roll this game out. Features: we are planning to have cooperative and competitive multiplayer added to the game if there will be a demand for it. We also have a tagging mechanic that we currently removed (for balancing reasons) but we might introduce it back into the game as a future update.

As for content, we are planning to support it with regular updates and in-game events that will hopefully keep the players engaged. We are also currently in talks with a few local artists to collaborate and bring their IPs (characters) into the game. As for future projects, we currently have a shelved multiplayer game that we would like to revisit after we roll out Brawl Quest.


Want to show off your exciting new game? We host Big Indie Pitch events throughout the year, so be sure to keep an eye out on our events page for an event near you.

Upcoming BIPs include:

More coming soon so make sure to regularly check our upcoming events page here and over on BigIndiePitch.com

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Developer Evangelist & Big Indie Pitch Manager / Special Features Writer

Queen of all things Indie. Sophia is Steel Media’s Big Indie Pitch Manager and Developer Evangelist. She’s also a global speaker and lifelong gamer with a fanatical love of all things Nintendo and Japan. So much so that she’s written a thesis on one and lived in the other.