September 24, 2019
Lake Horse Studio Charges In For A Comeback!
Every year at the IMGA we get to see many new and innovative games. A lot of submissions are from well-known studios but we also receive entries made by smaller indie teams.
One such team is Lake Horse Studio which was founded just in March 2017. They took home three awards in last year’s IMGA MENA! Their first game, Harmony won Excellence in Audio while their second game, “O” was awarded Excellence in Innovation and Best Quickplay Game.
We got in touch with Babak Salimi who is a programmer and game designer at Lake Horse Studio. We hope that their story resonates with you and encourages your passion for game development.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and Lake Horse Studio.
We are Lake Horse; an indie mobile game studio with four developers.
Two of our members used to be in a rock band named Bivareh, and the other two worked as programmers. We started making games two years ago and our first game was Harmony.
Harmony was published in our local market in Iran and a year later we published Harmony in the global market with the help of Infinity Games.
On the other hand “O“, which was made in almost 2 weeks, won multiple awards but was not successful in the market. We also made a new version of O called O’, which we are going to submit alongside some other games for 4th IMGA.
You won 3 awards at the 3rd IMGA MENA last year! How does it feel to have all those awards under your studio’s name?
We are happy that all of our games (which is just 2!) got the attention of the juries of IMGA and yes, in fact, winning these awards helped us to be more recognizable in Iran, but its also a little bit frustrating when none of them weren’t able to generate a good amount of revenue.
Despite the challenges you faced with Harmony and O, what did you enjoy the most about developing these games?
There are a lot of things about game development that we like but I think that being able to make something that we enjoy playing ourselves feels great.
But for me personally, I really enjoy the process, the challenges we face as a team and the fun we have while working on a game. Being able to be creative in every aspect of a game, and combining art and engineering to make a product is just really satisfying for our team.
What do you hope to see in the future of the game industry in Iran?
We think that game development in Iran is growing fast and teams are getting better every day.
We’re hoping to be able to help this community and help ourself to make better and more successful games, but we don’t actually know whether game development in Iran is actually an industry or not.
You mentioned that you want to help the game community in Iran. In what way does it need improvement?
I actually meant an exchange of knowledge is what our game community lacks, buts it’s also improving as the time passes. But I personally think most Iranian teams lack a good business plan and strategy for making a revenue, like us but the good thing is that we know this problem and we’re learning from our past mistakes.
What’s next for Lake Horse Studio?
Lake Horse is focused on making casual and hyper-casual mobile games with the approach of minimalism, and we’re hoping to create more successful titles in the upcoming years.
Looks like the others need to watch out for Lake Horse Studio’s return to the 4th IMGA MENA! We would like to give special thanks to Babak Salimi for taking the time to answer all our questions.
If you have a game that you would like to enter for the 4th IMGA MENA, there is still time! You have until September 30 to submit your games here.
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