Interview

The Big Indie Interviews: Black Trumpet Games discusses The Big Indie Pitch and their game Runick

We chat to the runner-up of the second Big Indie Pitch in Poland which once again took place at GIC

The Big Indie Interviews: Black Trumpet Games discusses The Big Indie Pitch and their game Runick

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.

The Big Indie Pitch at GIC top 3

Today, we're speaking to Toni Steyskal from Black Trumpet Games, who submited Rucick to The Big Indie Pitch at GIC 2018 and walked away with the prize for second place.

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

Toni Steyskal: My name is Toni Steyskal and I come from Croatia. I've always loved games and wanted to work in the video games industry. This passion landed me a full time job as a game developer but that wasn't enough, so I've started working on additional games in my free time with my colleagues from Black Trumpet Games studio.

Black Trumpet Games is a fresh studio whose goal is to create great indie games. Currently the team consists of Filip (the developer behind our other game Getaway Garden), Nikola (creates art and music for our games) and Maja (a talented artist who currently helps us with social media, events and everything else).

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

Runick is a 3D isometric simple, yet challenging puzzle game. The idea is to use rune infused shapes to adequately mark all the tiles on a given board. The shapes the user interacts with adhere to certain geometric principles. We are excited to see that people enjoy it at conferences so much that we always need more devices to be able to show it to people. Awards also prove that game has potential, we won the "Best Casual Game" award at IT Konekt in Belgrade, the 2nd place on the mobile Big Indie Pitch at GIC in Poznan and the most recent one "Best Gameplay" Indie Award at Reboot Infogamer in Zagreb. Runick is currently in development and will be finished this year, so expect a release somewhere in the start of 2019 on all the possible platforms we can get it on!

How hard is it to survive as an indie developer?

Since we are working on this in our free time we currently don't know how hard it is to survive as an Indie developer. But I heard from my other colleagues that it definitely isn't the easiest thing around to be an Indie developer. Once we release Runick and see how it goes we will have a better insight in the life of an Indie developer.

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

The Big Indie Pitch was amazing, this was my first experience of that kind. Having to pitch your game in a short and limited time makes you think extremely hard how to present yourself and the game. After every pitch session I felt like I learned something new and improved my next pitch with that knowledge. I would recommend it to all Indie developers since you get to know better what are the hooks and kicks of your game when you present it to other people. And I still can't believe we won the 2nd place on our first Big Indie Pitch, now I want to win the bat next time!

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

Apart from the mentioned knowledge and pitching sessions, I've met a lot of different developers and publishers with whom I might cooperate in the future. The big part of the Big Indie Pitch aside the pitching, for me, was also the networking. Since we also won the Basic Indie Package we hope to achieve a bigger awareness about our game and studio that could result in a better release and support for future games.

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

This is our first game from Black Trumpet Games that will be available on the market so we expect to learn from it as much as possible for our future projects. We hope Runick will catch a large audience from kids to grandparents to entertain them with challenging puzzles and make our studio known. Money wise we would be more than satisfied if Runick just made it possible for us to work on our next project but of course we will aim higher. There are already some plans for future projects, including Getaway Garden, but currently our focus is to finish Runick first.


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.