Imagine one day, an asteroid the size of the moon was to hit planet Earth and kill every human that resided on it, making human kind almost extinct to the point that the only hope for it to survive are the people on board various spaceships in our galaxies searching for a similar planet.
Last Starfleet is a co-operative strategy card game where everyone is helping each other to win and save mankind. Either everybody wins and mankind survives to look at another day or everyone dies and the human species faces extinction.
In an exclusive chat with AnimationXpress.com, Crimzon Studios founder and director Amit Ghadge, reveals much about the game and how it got the look and feel; apart from the next projects coming from the studio soon.
“As a kid I was very fascinated by board games. Our family used to have a game session on most weekends and I became a collector of board games. That is where interest in creating board games came about,” reveals Amit.
On probing Amit on the premise of the game he expounds, “It’s a Sci-Fi action packed cooperative strategy game. In the year 4010, humankind has ships in space but no colonies. Earth explodes and the last of our kind must set aside their differences and team up to tame a wild world and save humanity before time runs out! Players will captain their starships as humankind’s Last Starfleet! Each ship has its own deck of cards which players will use to upgrade their ships, guard against planet attacks and land their crew in order to win the game! Each planet will pose unique challenges to the team and landing your people is never an easy task. Everyone wins in Last Starfleet… or all is lost.”
Amit has been working closely with board game companies like Giant Goblin Games and Wicked Grin Games and this project came to him after he finished work on one of the board games Storm The Castle. This is his first game with Sam Oplinger, Last Starfleet game designer.
“We were working with Giant Goblin Games on a board game project after Storm The Castle, and at the same time Sam had completed his prototyping and game testing and was looking for graphic artist. This was also our first Sci-Fi genre game and we were equally excited about it, then we exchanged a few samples of our art and understood the concept of the game, did some R&D on the stylisation, and that’s how we started with our graphic partnership with Wicked Grin Games. Last Starfleet was our first game with Sam which was successfully funded on kickstarter and now work is on with the second game.”
Amit faced several challenges to create the innovative cards and Sam and he were very specific about what they wanted. For the cards, which formed the integral part of the game he says, a look that was ahead of its time was very important since it had to fit in with the genre of the game and make the players teleport themselves into that environment.
“We were provided with the character art already, it was very challenging to create futuristic looking cards which can take the players to another world. We were very specific about the colours that should be used in the complete game design, lots of neon lights and reflective strip patterns are used in the artwork. I am a fan of those rusty looking elements, so I had to use them here and they gave a nice touch to the game cards. Another challenge was to create different planets where the ships will land. The ship mats were the most interesting cards to work on as they had to fit with most of the information about the ships within the limited space,” highlights Amit.
Amit has worked on several noted comics and has been part of seven board games. On asking him about working for the digital game industry, (PC and mobile games), he says, “Two of our seven board games have been successfully crowdfunded. We worked on two PC games which were for educational purposes but we haven’t yet got an opportunity to design for mobile games. We are interested if anything comes up. We are currently working with Wicked Grin Games on a new game Fortune and Folly. On the comics front, work is about to finish on the first issue of DeathDay Presents which is going to be a four issue miniseries. Soon after that, work will begin on The Devils Pools #3 with Arkvindicta publications. Work is also in progress for The Wreck Age #2,” he ends.