Tell us about your journey with Reverie…
"We started working on Reverie in our spare time while in our final days at Media Design School. We spent a couple of weeks throwing ideas around during our lunch breaks and eventually came to the realisation that we could make this idea come to life. Each of us committed to our roles of one programmer, one artist, and one marketing/documentation person. We planned to make a game for PS Vita as all of us loved the little handheld and wanted to make something for it before the console became completely irrelevant.
In June of 2017 is where the excitement began for our little team. We got contacted by a publisher in Hong Kong named Eastasiasoft who had been keeping tabs on our Twitter feed and they offered to publish our game in the Asian regions for the PS Vita including creating a limited run of physical editions for Reverie. This was a big swing for us in terms of expectations for the game. When we started development, we never would have thought we would have physical copies of our game made!
After a couple of months of various discussions with Eastasiasoft, they also offered to do a PlayStation 4 physical release with the same contract details as the PS Vita release. Now we were really excited. Having these deals set in stone meant that the possibility of Rainbite continuing on to future projects was almost close to guaranteed.
Recently we submitted Reverie to Sony QA and passed! The game is set to release on PS Vita within the month of March 2018 digitally in North America and Europe with the Eastasiasoft published editions and Asian releases coming in either April or May of 2018."
How did Rainbite come to be?
During our third year at MDS when we had our group project, we decided to call our group Rainbite since that name was relevant to us (Daniel, the artist for Reverie, already had the company name registered). At the end of the year when our team parted ways, the three of us programmers stuck together as we had already begun the planning of Reverie. We went through a small phase of logo iterations until we got what we have now so we could build our own identity and now here we are!"
What is it like working with a bunch of like-minded people?
"It's fantastic! Although political views differ between us, that doesn't stop us from being good friends and good workmates too. If there is an issue in the team, we are all happy and willing to talk through the problem until a solution is found. As long as we can keep up these open discussions about any issues that arise, I believe Rainbite will live on!"
What are some of the most important lessons you learned during your time at Media Design School?
"Communication and networking. Communication in a team environment is so important to having a team that works together and has minimal conflict. The better the team's communication is, the easier it is to solve any conflict that does arise. Networking is also something I learned about and how to do it. Although it took me a while to wrap my head around it, it’s probably the most important thing you can do if your looking to get into independent development."
What are your plans for the future?
"More games of course! All of our plans are up in the air at the moment as we need to see how well Reverie does in terms of sales. If it does well, we’ll keep making games! If it goes poorly, I can imagine I’ll find myself in another games company doing similar stuff to what I’m doing now. I might even get more involved with community management too!"
