February 2014
What lies ahead in 2014
It’s interesting being in the games industry, especially working on licensed titles as we typically do at Torus. When you gaze a year ahead, you obviously have plans for your current projects, hopes for your own projects and then beyond that, we have thousands of possibilities. We always have a number of potential projects in discussion, some of which may take months before they go ahead, and any day you may get the call from the publishers that a project is green-lit and that Torus has been chosen as the developer to create the title. You fire into action, start your plans and look toward the end of the next project.
At the start of the year, you don’t always know the project that you’ll be working on before the end of the year. This is quite an exciting prospect, and it keeps our lives interesting. Our history shows a wide range of titles; shooters to puzzlers, mini game packs and racers, platformers and flying titles. With that experience and the engine which powers it all, you know that anything is possible.
2014 starts a little differently to previous years. Not only is this Torus’ 20 year anniversary, but we start this year with the knowledge that we have the backing of Screen Australia, which is enabling us to fully develop original titles. That gives us two main focuses instead of one – continue to work with our existing (and new) publishing partners on their titles, and build up our infrastructure to launch our own titles. We currently have two in development. We have other titles in development which are unannounced and finish up during the year, and as always we have new titles in discussion right now. The games industry is never the same.
For us, part of the excitement of the ‘new’ is already happening with Falling Skies: Planetary Warfare. Available on iOS and Android right now, it’s our first big title to go live. For typical game developers, we work up until we ship the game, then the game hits the shelves and the only metrics you have afterwards are the occasional sales data passed on by publishers. Now, we have real-time information for how many people are playing the game. We can tweak and tinker and change information if we find something is not working. Although patching games post-launch is not a new concept, it’s not something we’ve had much exposure to. Typically our games are free of major bugs, burned to a cartridge or disc and never tampered with again. To have the option of making changes to improve a game for users is something we’ve looked forward to for a while. We expect that when the new series of Falling Skies launches later in 2014, we’ll see a spike of interest. However, anyone ready to compete in Aliens vs Humans can jump into the game right now.
It’s interesting being in the games industry, especially working on licensed titles as we typically do at Torus. When you gaze a year ahead, you obviously have plans for your current projects, hopes for your own projects and then beyond that, we have thousands of possibilities. We always have a number of potential projects in discussion, some of which may take months before they go ahead, and any day you may get the call from the publishers that a project is green-lit and that Torus has been chosen as the developer to create the title. You fire into action, start your plans and look toward the end of the next project.
At the start of the year, you don’t always know the project that you’ll be working on before the end of the year. This is quite an exciting prospect, and it keeps our lives interesting. Our history shows a wide range of titles; shooters to puzzlers, mini game packs and racers, platformers and flying titles. With that experience and the engine which powers it all, you know that anything is possible.
2014 starts a little differently to previous years. Not only is this Torus’ 20 year anniversary, but we start this year with the knowledge that we have the backing of Screen Australia, which is enabling us to fully develop original titles. That gives us two main focuses instead of one – continue to work with our existing (and new) publishing partners on their titles, and build up our infrastructure to launch our own titles. We currently have two in development. We have other titles in development which are unannounced and finish up during the year, and as always we have new titles in discussion right now. The games industry is never the same.
For us, part of the excitement of the ‘new’ is already happening with Falling Skies: Planetary Warfare. Available on iOS and Android right now, it’s our first big title to go live. For typical game developers, we work up until we ship the game, then the game hits the shelves and the only metrics you have afterwards are the occasional sales data passed on by publishers. Now, we have real-time information for how many people are playing the game. We can tweak and tinker and change information if we find something is not working. Although patching games post-launch is not a new concept, it’s not something we’ve had much exposure to. Typically our games are free of major bugs, burned to a cartridge or disc and never tampered with again. To have the option of making changes to improve a game for users is something we’ve looked forward to for a while. We expect that when the new series of Falling Skies launches later in 2014, we’ll see a spike of interest. However, anyone ready to compete in Aliens vs Humans can jump into the game right now.
