Q&A: Capy on creating Clash of Heroes, 2009’s best RPG/puzzle game
Despite its low key status as the secret best RPG/puzzle game of the year, you might have heard about Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, if not for its addictive battle system, pretty boy smiles, and inventive take on the puzzle/RPG formula, then for the acclaim it’s received from anyone who spent more than a minute with the DS title.
Both Boing Boing and Gamasutra honored it as one of 2009’s best handheld releases, IGN called it the year’s Best DS Strategy Game and nominated it for Best DS Multiplayer Game, and Penny Arcade has already namedropped it a couple times. The Penny Arcade mention is important, as the webcomic’s kingmakers were instrumental in calling attention to 2007’s puzzle/RPG sleeper hit Puzzle Quest.
We recently caught up with the folks at Capy, the Toronto indie developer behind Clash of Heroes, to talk about the game. Here, the studio discusses how it sought to differentiate its title from Puzzle Quest, where Clash of Heroes fits in the Might & Magic series, and why pixel art has become so rare in modern games.
We’ve seen an explosion of puzzle hybrid games in the past two years since Puzzle Quest’s success. Did you pick up any lessons or inspirations from those releases for your own puzzle hybrid title?
Nathan Vella (co-founder/president): The single largest thing we learned from those games was that we wanted to create, from scratch, a new take on the puzzle/strategy hybrid. We knew that, no matter what we did, the game would be compared to Puzzle Quest, so we wanted to ensure it was, in a way, nothing like Puzzle Quest.
tags / clash of heroes / might and magic / ubisoft / capybara / interview / ec
