I was most fortunate to have an email interview with the gentleman who createrd Pulp-city Heroes, the Skirmish superhero game which I am enjoying playing and collecting at the moment. so big thanks to Maciej Zylewicz.
Please vist their website @ www.pulp-city.com
how long have you guys now been up and running ?
I started working on the game roughly 5 years ago, first stuff was announced online 4 years ago and we opened up the sales 3,5 years ago.
how did you start out ? was it very small scale or did you come from other larger projects?
It started and pretty much still is a hobby project. From the very beginning it was just me, now I have one formally employed co-worker and an amazing team of consultants, designers and friends who help me out with the game.
The initial idea was to provided top concepts turned into miniatures sculpted by professionals. Initially we were super tight on budget as the miniature games do not have fast or instant returns.
Over the years I pressed on to warrant the highest artistic quality of the sculpts and the presentation and you can probably see that each next wave is usually better than the previous one ( I guess it is like with the musicians, they tend to like the last album best).
also why super heroes ? was it from a love of super heroes or was it just because you had noticed a gap in the market?
There is as gap in the market. There are very few well sculpted super-heroes on the market. But it is a niche within a niche. While the comic-book tag attracts some Customers, it shuts the door in front of the others.
I am a huge comic book fan. I love retro 50's stuff as well as the modern day series. Pulp City had been walking both worlds, taking a bit from the Golden&Silver eras and from the modern, where spandex isn't an obligatory item.
how long did play testing take? did you always use cards to represent the characters or did you toy about with other things like army lists ?
Playtesting is a process. Coming up with the core rules is 10% of the success, maintaining interesting rules for Supremes is the ongoing process.
Every game lives a certain life-cycle, after which it has to fine-tune itself because 100 models = 100 little rules sets and they have to work together!
I am a big believer of the "ockhamization" - cutting out irrelevancies from the game rules to allow the players to focus on the core of the experience: strategy and fun!
How hard was it to get a foot hold in a market that seems dominated by bigger model companies ?
Yes, it is. For big companies, direct productions costs are the biggest challenger (hence striving to switch to plastic or cheaper alternatives to pewter), for smaller companies it is the creation costs (as they are exactly the same as for the giants, but they are spread over fewer copies of each model sold).
Please mind most of the small companies assume the break-even policy as they are run by people with dayjobs etc.
and finally where do you see pulp city going ? would you ever move onto plastic miniatures or even smaller scale resin models?
Not at this point. Pewter is the part of the appeal and part of the magic of the hobby - it is as old-school as it gets.
a year from now what do you see pulp city looking like? are there anymore factions or super teams on the horizon?
I see a much higher model count then in 2011. We got some amazing things down the line, so it is worth waiting.
First on the agenda is to complete all current subfactions. So you may expect likes of VH or Papa Zombie.
Then... we may have a small surprise for all the Pulp City citizens!
thank you for your time.
Thanks!
Maciej Zylewicz (morf)
Please vist their website @ www.pulp-city.com
how long have you guys now been up and running ?
I started working on the game roughly 5 years ago, first stuff was announced online 4 years ago and we opened up the sales 3,5 years ago.
how did you start out ? was it very small scale or did you come from other larger projects?
It started and pretty much still is a hobby project. From the very beginning it was just me, now I have one formally employed co-worker and an amazing team of consultants, designers and friends who help me out with the game.
The initial idea was to provided top concepts turned into miniatures sculpted by professionals. Initially we were super tight on budget as the miniature games do not have fast or instant returns.
Over the years I pressed on to warrant the highest artistic quality of the sculpts and the presentation and you can probably see that each next wave is usually better than the previous one ( I guess it is like with the musicians, they tend to like the last album best).
also why super heroes ? was it from a love of super heroes or was it just because you had noticed a gap in the market?
There is as gap in the market. There are very few well sculpted super-heroes on the market. But it is a niche within a niche. While the comic-book tag attracts some Customers, it shuts the door in front of the others.
I am a huge comic book fan. I love retro 50's stuff as well as the modern day series. Pulp City had been walking both worlds, taking a bit from the Golden&Silver eras and from the modern, where spandex isn't an obligatory item.
how long did play testing take? did you always use cards to represent the characters or did you toy about with other things like army lists ?
Playtesting is a process. Coming up with the core rules is 10% of the success, maintaining interesting rules for Supremes is the ongoing process.
Every game lives a certain life-cycle, after which it has to fine-tune itself because 100 models = 100 little rules sets and they have to work together!
I am a big believer of the "ockhamization" - cutting out irrelevancies from the game rules to allow the players to focus on the core of the experience: strategy and fun!
How hard was it to get a foot hold in a market that seems dominated by bigger model companies ?
Yes, it is. For big companies, direct productions costs are the biggest challenger (hence striving to switch to plastic or cheaper alternatives to pewter), for smaller companies it is the creation costs (as they are exactly the same as for the giants, but they are spread over fewer copies of each model sold).
Please mind most of the small companies assume the break-even policy as they are run by people with dayjobs etc.
and finally where do you see pulp city going ? would you ever move onto plastic miniatures or even smaller scale resin models?
Not at this point. Pewter is the part of the appeal and part of the magic of the hobby - it is as old-school as it gets.
a year from now what do you see pulp city looking like? are there anymore factions or super teams on the horizon?
I see a much higher model count then in 2011. We got some amazing things down the line, so it is worth waiting.
First on the agenda is to complete all current subfactions. So you may expect likes of VH or Papa Zombie.
Then... we may have a small surprise for all the Pulp City citizens!
thank you for your time.
Thanks!
Maciej Zylewicz (morf)
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