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September 07, 2005
5 Questions - David Potter, Ensign Games
Who are you, what do you do and what are you working on?
My Name is David Potter, and I am Director of Development at Ensign games. I have been in computer game development for about 10 years and have 5 traditional published game products under my belt. This is
my first adult content game product.
Ensign Games is a small computer game development house that was formed from the founders of Catware Inc. We did not always do Adult Games, but found that it was a market that a small development house could get into using the 3D Technology that we had been developing for more traditional games.
One of the projects we are now we working on is an addon pack for DreamStripper. This will add more clothes and hair styles and some UI enhancements.
What process was used to animate the stripper's moves?
In DreamStripper we used RedEye Studios to motion capture and rig our animated dancer.
We first had to find a 2 dancers and have them break down some of the dances into the individual segments for motion capture. We found two very nice performers at a local strip club. It seems in the strip club scene there are no real names or layout for an exotic dance routine. So, we had a lot of fun trying to breakdown and name each dance move - names like "splitswiggle" and "gyratedown" come to mind.
Once we had our dances segmented and named, we had to decide which dance segments we wanted to motion capture, the dancers suited up and we motion captured each of the dance segments. It took an entire day to capture about 50 dance moves for about 300 seconds of actual animation.
Do you have any plans on creating a male version of Dream Stripper?
We have thought about creating a male stripper version, but I do not think the online market is strong enough. Again, just like any other game, it is how many can you sell to break even with development costs? With the female version of DreamStripper and our research into the adult online market, I do not see how a male version would be financially viable as the female version is just holding steady. Now, if somehow we could distribute DreamStripper in a box retail form, I do believe it would then be viable.
As an on-line only AO game, is distribution and reaching the market a challenge for you?
Yes this is very challenging, as many US PC game review and news sites are reluctant to put any news or reviews of our game on their web page, and for advertising they will not take any sort of adult oriented advertising. We have found a couple of European PC game web sites like Gamers Hell that carry news of DreamStripper. We made a decision to keep DreamStripper very "R" rated and not get into the "X" rated market. I think this has helped us with advertising on many sites that are not just adult content related. Right now about 45% of our Sales are non-US/Foreign. We have also started an affiliates program. we are hoping to have the affiliates help get the word out and sell some product.
What advice do you have for other developers looking to enter the adult market space?
My advice would be to do your research on your target market and have a plan for advertising. One of the best things we did was put out a press release and talk more about the technology and game and less about the sex aspect. Something we are doing since we are a smaller development house is to keep communication with our customers and fans open on a daily basis. We have forums that keep our customers up to date on all updates and patches for DreamStripper. We also are asking what the customers want to see for any future add-ons to DreamStripper.
Posted by BrendaBrathwaite at September 7, 2005 10:46 AM | Discuss this post on our forums