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Small Interview:

Added 08-04-2023

Stadia GamesDB! (stdb): First of all can you tell us something about Big Village Games?

Big Village Games (bvg): We are a new company on the block, drawing from a wealth of experience in game development. Dave, our Technical Director has had regular stints as an indie game developer, alongside a career as a programmer. Jeremy, our Art Director, brings 30+ years of art and design experience to the team.
Big Village Games exists because we are passionate about making games that look and feel amazing to play, provide fun challenges for a range of different players, and give a few good chuckles along the way.

stdb: And about Merek's Market, what will the Stadia users find when they fire up the game for the first time?

bvg: We’ve all played as the main character in so many games, where we are constantly badgering poor shopkeepers, haggling on their wares, using their shop as a base for upgrades, and generally making their life difficult - in Merek’s Market we flip this concept on its head! Now you are the unfortunate shopkeeper that must craft for and haggle with an abundance of kooky characters - go ahead and overprice that sword, he’s only going to run off and get eaten by a bear in ten minutes!
At launch, you will be able to run your shop solo in a full single player campaign or couch co-op with up to 4 players. Create your team with friends and tackle the multiplayer campaign to test how strong your friendships really are!

stdb: Is Merek's Market going to support any Stadia exclusive feature?

bvg: We’ve thrown around the idea of Crowd Choice where viewers of a stream choose the next batch of customers entering the shop. As a small team, we really have to put our limited time into aspects of the game that the most people will enjoy. This side of launch, we won’t be implementing Stadia specific features but we love the passion, excitement, and support that we have experienced from the Stadia community. If we can create something that really makes the most of Stadia’s features, and there’s a demand from the community, I’m sure we can make it happen.

stdb: You’re aiming for PS, Xbox and Stadia - what's the difference between developing the game on a cloud platform like Stadia and the other ones, if there's any?

bvg: Merek’s Market is part of the Stadia Makers program. The experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive, Stadia are great partners and we’d recommend working with them! They’ve smoothed out every bump we encountered so we could focus on launching day zero on Stadia.
On the technical front, it’s not been all that different to other platforms. The streaming tech behind Stadia is mostly abstracted away. We can just make fun stuff and it just works! One thing we’ve been sure to do is keep a constant 60 FPS so playing Merek’s Market on Stadia is as smooth and responsive as possible.

stdb: What do you think about Cloud Gaming?

bvg: The experience of browsing the store, buying a game and being able to play it within minutes, without having to maintain game updates is unparalleled with other non-cloud gaming platforms.
As developers, we are excited about the prospect of these platforms breaking into new international markets and delivering games to audiences that just couldn’t access them via expensive hardware.
Indie games are taking up more and more of a share of the market, and have long been the largest chunk of a platforms catalogue - it’s very exciting to see cloud platforms like Stadia providing third-party developer support for original indie games like Merek’s Market.

stdb: Anything in the foreseeable future that could bring more Big Village Games on Stadia, or is too early?

bvg: It may be a little too early for us to be thinking about any future projects just yet - we are currently very distracted making Merek’s Market as silly and as enjoyable as possible! That said, Stadia have been fantastic partners and we certainly wouldn’t shy away from looking to launch on the Stadia platform for future projects should the opportunity arise!

Remember you can follow Merek's Market and Big Village Games on Twitter

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