We had such a clear idea of what it was what we wanted to make. The ambition for the game is an online experience with a great local multiplayer as well, so going into Early Access not had something that was effective enough locally. "Our ambition was so big from the beginning we were moving into different territory with Unreal and we knew that if we were going to pull this off properly, if we went into Early Access with the prototype that we'd had, we didn't have any online or anything. "We always knew that we needed the backing," he says. But Bennett says had the developer rolled out into Early Access without outside backing, it simply would not have worked. With this release model - and being an indie studio - it seems possible that Roll7 could have launched without a publisher. Laser League launched into Early Access in February. It has really helped us become a bit more laser focused with making sure we're actually being realistic about what's achievable with the team in the time frame that we have." "We have to be tighter with milestones and things which has been a little bit of a shock for us having come from slightly more relaxed milestones. "Associated with that is the extra pressures and deadlines," Bennett says. In fact, Bennett says that Laser League has a budget eight times larger than OlliOlli 2. The ambition - and thus the budget - is far greater than Roll7's previous works. They gave us the green light and we had to scale up from four to about 20." "We have pedigree, we have won a BAFTA, so they were up for it. "This is exactly what he said 505 was after as a publisher," Bennett says. The company eventually signed with 505 Games' business acquisition chief Ted Regulski having pitched to him at Paris Games Week. None of us on that team were capable of doing this." We had scaled back to four of us me, John, Tom and Sam, our QA guy. We realised that if we were going to have an ambition as ridiculous as we had at the start of this project, keeping in mind that we had no-one on our team at that point capable of using Unreal or anything like that. This game, right from the start, has been in done 'properly', which is weird for us. ![]() ![]() We got UK Games Fund money, brought on a prototyper and all these different things. Rather than building the game and working it out as we went like OlliOlli, we decided to do a pre-production process. "We have never done a pre-production process like that," Bennett says. In contrast to the development process of previous games including OlliOlli, the studio approached Laser League - by Bennett's own admission - 'properly'. It was obstinately the simplicity of a Pong or Pac-Man type experience with Snake." "We knew we wanted to something with ultra neon tactics, which was this very simple version of the Laser League mechanic where you were a dot moving around on a black screen and you hit another dot which was a node and that becomes a laser. "John and I were playing a lot of Rocket League and thought it was awesome," Bennett says. The game began life in 2016 after the developer wound up work on previous release Not A Hero, after the studio had moved from an office-based structure to the core team of four working remotely. That might be a fact that's hard to swallow for anyone who has seen the game in motion, with its black and neon art style, combined with its sports-centric gameplay, but studio co-founder Simon Bennett says that this is a happy accident. Despite the similarities in art style, Roll7's Laser League is not inspired by Tron.
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