CONSEQUENCES – SEQUEL AND ITS SCOPE – Kingdom Battle was developed by more or less 100 people (Ubisoft Paris + Milan and Montpellier). Sparks of Hope’s dev team was instead up to around 300 people working on the game. This expansion is also what caused Ubisoft Chengdu, Montpellier and Pune to join Ubisoft Milan and Paris. By Manzanares onw voice:
“The game’s scope changed a lot and evolved compared to Kingdom Battle. It’s bigger, so we needed new collaboration for the project.” shares Xavier Manzanares. While the Paris and Milan studios are still co-leading the artistic direction, creative vision, tech vision, and design, Ubisoft Chengdu was brought on to develop the planets and NPCs, Montpellier to work on cinematics and animation support, and Pune to help test the game. As such the game was truly a collaborative project, which extends to the involvement Yoko Shimomura and Gareth Coker joining Grant Kirkhope as co-composers for the game. The goal was to have each them bring their unique styles together to fulfill the game’s vision, which has seemingly made for an “incredible cocktail” and a brilliant result.”
In particular, we have a detailed split of resources invested by the Company:
- Ubisoft Paris & Milan – co-leading the artistic direction, creative vision, tech vision, and design.
- Ubisoft Chengdu – Planets and NPCs who are part of supporting the game’s scope as the Devs at Ubi Chengdu are passionate.
- Ubisoft Montpellier – Cinematics and Animation support who were involved in KB.
- Ubisoft Pune – helping out with testing the game.
Ubisoft saw Kingdom Battle critic reception, mass market interest, actual sales and decided to invest in its sequel, expanding its scope, increase (by +200%) its team and consequently and obviously, its budget: from the dream of a man, that has always been in love with Nintendo games and Miyamoto creations, a brand new commercial success, possibly a pillar for one of the biggest Western companies out there, was born. Sparks of Hope has just been released on Switch few weeks ago; its sales results are still not available, apart from its European sales being 7.5% higher than the original debut so far ( SOURCE ), without counting the vastly bigger digital split/ratio for retail software on Switch nowadys, compared to ’17 (for Nintendo Switch games it’s actually around 38% now, more than double compared to the first year on the market, as per Nintendo’s own data below), so it seems clear how the sequel is going to repeat a similar success compared to its predecessor: will this lead to a third episode, completing the trilogy? We will have to wait, and see…
