One year with Gemelli Games!

27 FEBRUARY 2023

Hi there!

This month, we celebrated Gemelli Games’ first anniversary… and what a year it has been!

In February 2022, Gemelli was just Antoine and me with a 20-page game concept document, the roughest of technical prototypes and a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Since then:

• We raised €1.5m in our pre-seed round

• We hired a fantastic team of 13 super talented artists, designers and developers

• We developed a playable prototype of our upcoming player-vs-player tactical battler game

• Most importantly, we’ve already held 6 playtests, logged in over 800 very direct pieces of feedback and learnt so much in the process!

Building Skygard Arena with our community

As mentioned in our first blog post, developing our game hand-in-hand with our community has been one of our guiding principles since the start of the studio. Ever since November 2022 (when we had our first playable prototype), we have been holding closed playtests on Thursdays every other week, listening to playtesters’ feedback, and improving the game in 2-week development sprints between each playtest.

This continuous improvement cycle has allowed us to refine so many aspects of the game: the user interface, the spells of each playable Hero, the level design of the arenas, the win conditions… All this feedback is extremely helpful to us in our mission to build the best possible player-vs-player tactical battler.

So far, the feedback on the game’s core gameplay loop has been very positive: building a team of 5 heroes among a roster of diverse characters, picking the best items for them, and fighting in the arena in a turn-based battle seem to be a valuable gameplay proposition for players. Seeing playtesters ask on Discord who is available for a game on a Sunday night, even though the current prototype is really rough, has been very rewarding and gives us much confidence in the long-term potential of the game!

The road ahead

Over the next few months, our focus will be on:

• Improving the user interface;

• Creating a proper first-time user experience (tutorial and progression systems more broadly) to easily onboard new players;

• Integrating more and more polished 3D models (Heroes and arenas) and animations ;

• Adding more playable spells and Heroes to add depth and replay value to the game.

Finally, our Discord server just opened to the public → join the community to get a chance to participate in incoming playtests and our future Alpha!

See you soon in Skygard,

Alexandre