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Anthony Rose : Hey, I’m Anthony, Founder at SeedLegals, and every day I meet amazing founders. And today I’m talking to a game developer. Now we will play games with venerate game developers. How does it work? Do they lie on islands, drinking daiquiris, creating these 3D things? Well actually – we’re about to find out. So we’re going to talk to James from Vertpaint. Hello James. Tell us about Vertpaint.
James Macleod : So I’m a game developer at Vertpaint. And, yeah, we are a growing brand in the games industry. We’ve worked on some of the biggest titles that I imagine a lot of the gaming audience will know. And, yeah, we’re launching our first game soon, which is exciting.
Anthony Rose : Okay. So you’re an outsourced game studio, so somebody has an idea, it could be Warner Brothers or something, or it could be a smaller studio. They lack the technical talent to build this. And they come to you.
James Macleod : Absolutely.
Anthony Rose : And so you’ve got a whole bunch of, no doubt, 3D savvy developers and you create games.
James Macleod : Absolutely. Yeah. So we’ve got, sort of, seven departments, to handle everything from conceptual ideas and illustration work all the way up to the 3D side. And also then the programing, the tool development, anything that’s going to help a developer achieve their goals, in making sort of a compelling product. Essentially that’s what we do.
Anthony Rose : Okay. So in a few moments, let’s educate everyone watching this about the way the games industry works, right. Because we read about these giant budgets of hundreds of millions. But obviously that’s going to be an exception. So what’s the sort of size of a game budget that you would get involved in?
James Macleod : Yeah, well hundreds of millions isn’t inaccurate. It’s quite common now, especially in the Triple-A space. I’d say most productions are leaning quite heavily towards that 100 million figure. And then it goes up and up and up. But yeah, we’ve worked on everything from below 10 million all the way up to multi-hundreds of millions.
Anthony Rose : And so who watching this should come to you if you’re looking to create a game, would they fund it? Would you fund it? How does the revenue dynamics work in the game industry?
James Macleod : No. Great question. So essentially, if you are a developer and you’re looking to make a world class product, that’s when you contact Vertpaint. We’re very much a premium developer. So quite often you’d hire us if there’s, you know, you really want your real time rendering to specifically optimise for something. And it has to be, you know, super high quality. That’s where we fit into the market. So up in this upper end, premium development support. But, and yeah, in terms of budget, we sort of cater to most game development budgets. Again, we are normally approached by this sort of more Triple-A leaning, but if it’s if the project is interesting, we’ll jump on it.
Anthony Rose : Okay. Now you’re also, I understand, creating your own game, a horror game. Tell us more.
James Macleod : Yeah. So the vision has always been to make Vertpaint like a big global brand. Not just, you know , obviously where we started as outsourcers. That’s our roots. But we’ve always wanted to develop a game to really show what it is we can do if left to our own devices. And, yeah, we put out our first teaser, and it got picked up by all of the gaming media, went massive. And we’re just really excited to sort of show the world more of what we’re working on.
Anthony Rose : Okay, so I’ve got this idea for a game. There’s a founder, hero figure.
James Macleod : Oh, yeah.
Anthony Rose : And they need to find these investors.
James Macleod : Oh, great game.
Anthony Rose : There are chasms, fire pits, dinosaurs, monsters in between. It’s really hard finding those investors. Okay, jokes aside.
James Macleod : I love that game. Yeah I’ve played that game before actually.
Anthony Rose : All right. Now you’re fundraising at the moment, right?
James Macleod : Oh we are actually. Yeah.
Anthony Rose : And are you fundraising to finance your own game? Build the team? Tell us a bit more.
James Macleod : Yeah. So, we actually raised 1.56 million to develop our game. We’ve already got the entire budget we need to build this thing. This was originally time to be released on PC first. And, sort of dipping our toes into marketing, it’s proven with our market valuation. So we’ve now, you know, we had, I think 810 million unique visitors across our, you know, load of articles that flew up about the game. So now we’ve decided, let’s go super ambitious. We want to release across all platforms. So we want to go on all platforms that cater to the higher end rendering. So, PlayStation, Xbox and PC simultaneous launch. And also we’d like to integrate full localisation support. So we’ve released around the world and people can enjoy it in their own native languages.
Anthony Rose : Okay. So 800 million is a mindblowing number. Now what’s your background? Are you a software developer? Designer? Tell us about you.
James Macleod : So I’m, yeah, I’m a game developer. So, I went to university to study game design. I’ve graduated with a first and then moved straight into the industry. I was picked up by Rockstar, which was just phenomenal. Had an amazing time, moved over to Edinburgh, and then, before launching the company, I wanted to have a little bit more experience. So I moved over to Canada, worked at Digital Extremes for a while. Amazing again. Had an amazing time. And then the edge got too strong and came back to the UK and developed Verpaint.
Anthony Rose : Okay, so usually I ask founders what got you to wake up one morning and say “I want to be a whatever”? I’m guessing you’re about 13 and you thought ‘I want to be a game developer’.
James Macleod : Yeah I’ve been really lucky. So, in my upbringing, this would confirm my age, but Lord of the Rings came out when I was, I think around about eight, and I obsessively watched the behind the scenes. And one of the, I think it was the Two Towers, excuse me, it was The Fellowship of the Ring. It had an advert for the Two Towers game, funnily enough. And I got hooked on CGI. I’d always been a big, like Spielberg fan and watching all that behind the scenes of the dinosaurs and this, that and the other. But from that moment onwards, there was only one thing I wanted to do before, that was paleontology. So not as commercially viable, I don’t think. But, nevertheless, and yeah, just rocketed towards it. Ever since then.
Anthony Rose : Sounds great. Okay. This sounds awesome. Vertpaint sounds awesome. Where can people find you to find out more?
James Macleod : Yeah. So we’ve got, the most important thing we’d love people to access is ritualtides.com. That’s the name of our flagship horror title. Otherwise, if you’re interested in working with us in a, sort of, co-development capacity, vertpaint.com. We’ve got all the details on there, and you can reach out to anyone on the team where we’re really active and engage with clients, whatnot. So yeah, just reach out. LinkedIn always, always accepting messages.
Anthony Rose : So do you have a downloadable demo? Is there a video? Where do people go to see or play this horror game?
James Macleod : Yeah. So, if you want to check out more about Ritual Tides, first and foremost check out the website. We’ve got all the social feeds and everything on there. But we are really excited to release our first gameplay teaser, which is going to be dropping soon.
Anthony Rose : Ritualtides.com, go there now. All right. Fantastic. Thank you James.
James Macleod : Thank you, Anthony. I appreciate it. Thank you.
