Digimancy Entertainment - June 2022 Company Update
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If you'd like to know more about Digimancy Entertainment, the RPG-focused studio George Ziets founded a few years back, you can now read this company update on the studio's official website. There, you'll find some information about the studio's background, its big picture goals and projects.
Check it out:
It’s 2022… two and a half years after Digimancy first came into being… and I probably should have written something like this sooner.
Since this is our first news update for Digimancy Entertainment, I thought I’d talk about the origins of the studio and what our team is trying to build.
The seeds for what would become Digimancy Entertainment were planted back in 2017. At the time, I had been in the games industry for about sixteen years and had gotten to know Kevin Saunders while working together on Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and again on Torment: Tides of Numenera. We were joined on Torment by our fellow co-founder, Steve Dobos, who was Torment’s lead engineer and had worked with Kevin years before.
As a team with complementary talents, we recognized that we had a partnership founded on mutual trust and respect, and we believed that by working together, we could build a game studio that would be dedicated to making the games we love most - narrative-focused RPGs.
But “narrative-focused” can mean a lot of different things to different people, so what does it mean to us?
Most importantly, it means we’re a narrative-first studio. When we design our games, we start with a story or character experience. Then we develop game systems to bring our narrative elements to life. The opposite approach is more common in the games industry… and sometimes systems and narrative are developed separately, under the assumption that certain systems (e.g., combat) need to be in every RPG. However, we think a narrative-first perspective can lead to more innovative and immersive games and mechanics.
For us, player choice is inherently tied to narrative games. Many of our team members are rooted in the tabletop tradition, where story isn’t just a linear script – it’s a give-and-take between the storyteller and the players. No medium besides games can easily achieve that, and we want player choices to have real, game-changing consequences in our RPGs.
We also want to transport players to new and original worlds and evoke a sense of wonder and discovery. My own best experiences with games were the ones that introduced me to unfamiliar settings where I felt like a stranger in a strange land. In the best cases, all the elements of the game worked together to transport me to a different reality. That’s what we want our games to do, especially the ones developed for our own internal IPs.
As a studio, we’ve had our ups and downs. At the end of 2021, our publisher-funded project was cancelled. This isn’t uncommon in the industry, but it’s never a fun experience for a team that pours its creative heart into a game.
Nevertheless, we’re still here and hard at work on new things. One of those projects is our own internal RPG, a single-player game set in an original IP. Our team is also developing pitches for new RPGs and RPG-adjacent games. Strong pitches can come from anyone on the Digimancy team. We encourage all our team members to develop a pitch or contribute to someone else’s.We’re collaborating on a couple projects with other studios too, and we’re continuing to look for development partnerships with publishers and IP holders who might be interested in working with our experienced team of RPG devs.
As soon as we can share more about the games we’re making, we will. In the meantime, I want to thank our industry allies, mentors, and partners, as well as our friends, family, and fans. Our journey is just beginning, and we’re happy to have you with us.
