Indie Game Developer Interview with Justin French CEO of Dream Harvest

Read below for our Indie Game Developer Interview with Justin French CEO of Dream Harvest. We caught up with Justin who we’ve actually known for years to hear about his exciting and ambitious project, NeuroSlicers.

INDIE GAME DEVELOPER INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN FRENCH

I’m Justin French, founder and CEO at Dream Harvest. We were founded in 2013 with the aim to build big AA experiences on PC and Console that combine online gameplay with a narrative twist. In late 2014 we started development on NeuroSlicers, a post-cyberpunk strategy game that completely reworks, reinvigorates and modernizes the RTS genre.

INDIE GAME DEVELOPER INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN FRENCH CEO OF DREAM HARVEST

CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT NEUROSLICERS, WHAT MAKES IT AWESOME?

NeuroSlicers takes place in a world where humanity lives their existence experiencing the world through an AR layer called the NeuroNet; where a digital veil has been pulled over societies eyes.

Sometime after the NeuroNet was built, certain members of society began to exhibit abilities that allowed them to manipulate the very fabric of the network and shape it to their every whim; and so the Slicers were born. Future hackers of a new reality, both feared by society, yet tolerated by the Factions and Corporations as tools in their endless battle for control of the city.

You are one of these new-born Slicers and you’re going to go on an epic journey, played across PVP, PVE and Co-Op gameplay, to discover the truth behind the NeuroNet and the Factions seeking its control. You’ll be trying to increase your reputation across the city, meeting and earning trust with a awesome cast of characters, building and customizing your Deck of Scripts and Faction Tech as you take contracts for the Factions, all in the hope to become the ultimate Slicer.

With NeuroSlicers we’ve taken the RTS genre in a completely new direction to traditional RTS where instead of seeing how fast you can click its all about how fast you can think.

We’ve made the experience a lot more approachable by focusing on “macro” based gameplay, though there’s still the high skill ceiling that competitive players of the genre expect, but the types of interactions and decision your making are completely different. To do this we use clever AI powered units that know what to target, what to prioritize and what to attack, though this can be overwritten with a robust rally system. Having AI Powered units leaves player free to make bigger tactical decisions centred around territory control, placement, upgrading your buildings and more.

In PVP we have smaller, arena like levels with cool objectives to fight over and matches that last between 8 – 12 minutes in 1v1 and bit longer in 2v2, 3v3 and other modes. We have dungeon crawling, a first in an RTS, along with epic boss battles and even element of rogue like games in one of our other PVE modes. There’s a lot of cool content for players to sink their teeth into and all of it feeds back into the core campaign.

Post launch we’re going to be adding a whole load of additional content, new modes, new Factions and Faction Tech, new scripts and more ways to customize your experience.

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WHAT HAS THE JOURNEY BEEN LIKE MAKING THIS GAME?

Long …..challenging……exciting…..emotional……incredibly rewarding – All of these things and more!

Its been a one hell of a journey; we’ve been developing NeuroSlicers for over 6 years. When we first started development back in November 2014, with Milcho Milchev, our Lead designer / Gameplay programmer’s 2D prototype, we were a team of just 3, working part time and unpaid.

It took us almost 2 years before we managed to secure some investment and bring on our Art Director, Loic Bramoulle onto the team. In 2018 we held a small private pre-alpha test with around 400 players; it was so successful that off the back of that we managed to secure some awesome Korean partners, which allowed the 4 of us to go full time. Then last year we managed to get enough funding to grow the team to 10 people and move into an awesome office in Brighton.

We always knew that NeuroSlicers was going to be a big project; it had to be in order to compete with the heavy hitters in the genre, but also, innovation takes time; it’s a really iterative process where you’re constantly having to test, rework and re-test things until they feel good. Development was always going to take a while with such a small team.

However, with plans to grow to around 15 – 20 people this year we’re in a great place as a team to get NeuroSlicers out sometime next year with the content and at the quality level we always wanted to aim for.

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WHAT GOT YOU INTO MAKING GAMES AND MAKING INDIE GAMES IN PARTICULAR? 

I’m in my 14th year working in this industry now, having gotten my break working for Side as an audio engineer working in dialogue production for big AAA games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Witcher 2, Warhammer: Space Marine and whole load of other games. I also worked at their main UK competitor, OMUK on games like Broken Sword 5, the Deponia Series, Runescape and a few other games.

At the same time, I was also doing freelance music and sound design work for a number of small indie studios who were predominantly making mobile games. I then did a stint in recruitment, running a games and tech desk.

While there I started Dream Harvest as I really wanted to build a studio that created bigger experiences; something between Indie and AAA, but with a smaller team that would have the agility and ability to quickly pivot and react to the changing market and that had the freedom to innovate. The biggest issue with AAA is that due to the incredibly large team sizes and hierarchy, it’s much harder to adapt, change direction and make decisions without it going up the chain; there’s so much more freedom with the smaller studio format.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM MAKING GAMES?

An immeasurable amount. I’ve always been an entrepreneur – I previously worked in the music industry as a recording and mix engineer and ran a studio and music business consultancy; But since starting Dream Harvest, I’ve really learnt to love the business side of the games industry; pitching and raising funding, managing budgets, managing a multidisciplinary team and the creative direction of a project, even the marketing side of things and the importance of community management. There’s always something new to learn, ways to improve, new disciplines to attempt to master. I’m still doing sound design for NeuroSlicers as well as supporting our composer with audio integration, but with Dream Harvest I’ve had the opportunity to do so much more.

IF YOU HAD ADVICE FOR INDIE GAMES MAKERS, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

I think there are two bits of advice I’d share: firstly, realise that you need to run your company as a business – making an awesome game is only half the journey. Put together a proper budget, pitch deck and business plan; do your market research and find your gap in the market before you start working on something. Realise that your ability to fund your games and mitigate risk at launch is based on your ability to properly dedicate a considerable amount of time understanding the market and your place within it.

Secondly, start building a community as early as possible – have a newsletter, start a Discord server, post on social media; share as much as possible. They are an invaluable resource that can help you to sanity check your ideas, test early builds and boost your sprits during the harder parts of the development process – treat them like an extension of your team, not just as consumers and they will reward you with their loyalty and passion for your games.

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HOW CAN PEOPLE SUPPORT YOU AND YOUR GAME?

So right now, we’re looking for feedback and thoughts on everything we’re creating rather than looking to take money from our community. We will be launching a brand new merch shop in the nearish future, but if people want to support us all they need to do for the time being is join us on Discord.

WHERE CAN PEOPLE BUY/PLAY THE GAME? AND LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR STUDIO?

People can jump on our Discord to try out a very basic version of our PVP every weekend which will be ongoing until our big Pre-Alpha Phase 2 test launches in March. This bigger test will include our first pass for the intro campaign missions, pvp and pve modes as well as narrative and progression systems. Here are links to all of our social profiles:

To hear more Justin and Dream Harvest., find NeuroSlicers on www.discord.gg/neuroslicers and www.twitter.com/Dream_Harvest. View the game trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b4ZXjDDu1o 

Thanks for reading our Indie Game Developer Interview with Justin French. For more Indie Game Developer Interviews visit https://intoindiegames.com/category/features/

This Article was written by: Harry Cole

One thought on “Indie Game Developer Interview with Justin French CEO of Dream Harvest

  1. Airwane says:

    it’s a great game with great potential. 1st time I play the Pvp the game made me think of playing a game of chess but fast pace. Quick thinking is real here! I’m looking forward to the final release

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