My name is Marco Cavicchioli and it’s with great pleasure that I announce Astralis – Forgotten Fighters, a videogame of which I am the Game Designer. I would like to tell you the story of its conception, if you have some time to spare.
In the last few years I’ve been appreciating a lot MOBAs gameplay experience. With a bit of presumption, during a hot summer, I thought of giving birth to a tabletop game that could use the same fun components of MOBAs, elevated to a strategic level.
I liked the idea a lot and I managed to get a working prototype in a couple of days. It took a couple of months of work to get it in a polished state. I then concentrated on testing, asking all kind of people, even if most were gamers like me, to give feedback on all aspect of the game.
All the good feedback on gameplay, convinced me that I actually had a really good idea. I started searching for resources to bring this project to life, not only in the tabletop environment, but also in the videogame world. I always had the dream of making a videogame since I played Dune. My studying career took a very different path (I’m a bachelor in History, specialized in Medieval Times), so it was by pure chance, or maybe it was destiny, that I met Marco Piccinini, an computer engineer and longtime project manager. This made it possible to get to the next step.
Marco Piccinini is the founder of Wannabe-Studios, entertainment division of J3Tech, a studio based in Modena specialized in innovative projects (web applications, Apps, AR/VR, video games, creative installations). After some initial talk to get acquainted, we decided that Astralis could be transposed into a digital format. Marco proposed to build the prototype of the game using his experience in the field, thankfully without asking for a bill.
Even if we were making a prototype, I wanted to make it right, to build a solid foundation for the project. I needed still two figures to complete the core of the team: a writer, possibly multilingual, and a competent artist. Getting a programmer out of sheer luck was already much, so I began worrying that finding the other two would be hard.
I remembered having played a tabletop role playing game some years before with a guy that had a passion for everything Sci-Fi, Riccardo Piccinini (No, he is not a relative with Marco), that impressed me with the stories he created. He jumped on board the project as soon as I talked him about it. Second stroke of luck. And the third was right behind the corner. He knew an artist that also had a passion for Sci-Fi, Fabio Carretti.
I don’t know if it’s just blind luck or there is something more, but Astralis seems off to a good start. And after some months of work, I can tell that it wasn’t just the beginning that went well.
