Ravegan is a game development and outsourcing company from Córdoba, Argentina. The core team's members have +10 years of experience, providing the entertainment industry from all around the globe with top-notch artworks from every different artistic discipline. Their new baby is Blue Rider, a long-awaited arcade-like shoot-em-up. The developers say it’s easy to play yet hard to beat. With some amazing graphics, cute yet dangerous characters, wonderful and varied landscapes, and more explosions than a KISS show, we had to find out more. We spoke to Daniel Igarza, Ravegan’s CEO, to get more information on this special little blaster.
Can you tell us a bit of background about Ravegan, how it started and how life is developing a game in Argentina?
I took my first steps as a Programmer back in the 90’s, but I decided to become an artist in the early 00’s. I got my first job for the gaming industry in 2004, working as a freelance Concept Artist and Illustrator for a German studio. I kept myself working as a freelance artist for several years, also learning new disciplines such as 3D Modelling, Texturing and Animations. Soon, I got more jobs than I could handle, so I started to ask for help from some close friends. We ended up being a team of 5 people, each working from his own home.
It wasn’t until 2010 that I rented an office downtown, so we could share the same space and time. Some of the curious visitors we received often ended up learning our tools and techniques and becoming new employees. Thus said, Ravegan was, indeed, an accident. It was never planned as a company. I was only focused on having fun and sharing our common passion with friends.
Developing in Argentina was always hard, especially in those old times when we didn’t have a proper internet bandwidth (in the beginning, I delivered my drawings from cyber-cafes, at happy-hour time!) and there wasn’t a videogame industry in our country, actually.
Under this shiny hood gameplay-wise there seems to be a lot going on. Can you tell us the brief outline of the game? Also, we had a peek at some of the Boss Battles and they look epic; just how difficult is it to progress in the game and how long does it take to complete?
With Blue Rider, we try to emulate the old arcade machines. It’s indeed quite a simple game, but extremely challenging. It may take 20-50 hours to beat the 9 final bosses, depending on the Player’s skills. But once you’ve learned how to deal with them, you can beat the entire game in just 1-2 hours, trying to beat the highest scores.
Bosses look nice, indeed… although no one has seen the LAST BOSS yet. We promise an astonishing last battle and ending!
Where did Blue Rider’s concept come from?
It came right out of our guts: it’s actually the game we would like to play. We focused on making a game that is completely intuitive; something players don’t need to learn how to play; they only have to grab the controls and… they’re playing already! It’s that simple, enjoyable from the first second of gameplay.
Blue Rider really has a fantastic look, even down to the highly detailed game logo. Everything looks very impressive. Has it been a long process?
Thank you! We are very proud of the results, especially because we took a huge risk and effort to develop this game. We didn’t count on any external funders, backers or publishers: we did it all by ourselves, using a big part of the money that came from our art outsourcing services.
We also accomplished quite a big game using a very small team of 5-6 people in just 11 months. I think we were so excited about it, that we made something epic! Many other average companies need up to 10-15 artists and engineers to produce a game this big in less than a year.
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