MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Operation: Tango – An espionage-themed co-op game for two, with gameplay based around communication.
Developer: Clever Plays
Location: Montreal, Canada
Team size: 6 in production, 1 community manager, 1 studio head, the rest is contract work
Progress: Released
Contact details: angela@clever-plays.com
Tell us about your game and why you decided to develop it?
Operation: Tango innovates in the co-op genre by putting verbal communication at the center of the experience. It builds around this by creating clever gameplay situations that are designed around the two players not seeing each other’s screen and needing to communicate information to their partner to move forward. This is the first full-fledged adventure game of the sort.
Who do you think the audience is?
There are two main audiences. 1) Regular gamers who like to play co-op games. 2) Gamers who wish there was a game adequate for sharing with a friend/significant other who’s not a hardcore gamer. All in all, the game appeals to people who want to have a more social experience.
What experience does the team have?
This is the second game released by the studio. The first one was Leap of Fate, an action roguelite shooter set in a world of cyberpunk and magic. Clever Plays’ two co-owners have more than 10 years of professional experience in the games industry and as a company administrator, respectively. The rest of the team has between three and seven years of experience.
Why did you decide to use Unity to create this game, can you tell us anything about using the engine on this project?
Unity is the most user-friendly engine out there, and C# is an easier language than C++, so that was our starting point when we started the studio. Since then, we’ve accumulated a lot of experience on this engine. On this project, we took advantage of several nice features of Unity such as multiplatform builds, HDRP and Vivox.
How long has the title been in development, how long will it likely take to complete?
About three years from start to release.
What kind of support are you looking for from a potential partner?
We are looking for a company to do the porting and publishing in the Nintendo Switch and mobile markets for the game Operation: Tango.
We are also looking for some funding for our next project, and mostly for marketing support. Although we have a good marketing/branding team, what we lack is the reach and scaling capabilities of a publisher.
