Figaro-Wig
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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Figaro Wig
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Venezuelan studio Physicz Games explains how Figaro Wig, a game about opera and a pink wig, ended up on iOS devices everywhere. What's your game called and what's it about?Figaro Wig is a physics-based puzzle-platform game about Wig, a sentient fashion item created to overcome baldness by barber-turned-mad-inventor Figaro. Of course, things don't go as planned for Figaro, as Wig escapes to live a bald-sweat-free life.Physicz is a Venezuelan development studio -- how does a Venezuelan perspective help shape the games you make?Venezuela has a very unique idiosyncrasy. Its socialist stand on politics and economy are definitely not the best climate for a game-development studio. Video games are a luxury item, and therefore they get no attention and much less support from the state or financial institutions. This means we have no access to international currency, our tools are very expensive and hard to come by, and there is no local video game industry to speak of (or to speak to).This, of course, is an oversimplification of our situation, but we're here to talk games, not politics. So here's the challenge we faced: How to make a competitive game with the same perceived production value that is expected from our audience, while keeping our budget in sync with our reality. Hence the old-school development approach. It's easier here to find craftsmen and artisans trained in the more conventional mediums of illustration, animation and music, than to find professionals in the cutting edge of technology, so we might as well harness that.
