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He and Ras covered half of the film's budget out of their own pockets, with the rest coming from a Kickstarter. But then we thought, why not?"ĭavid Bowles as Dale Vandermeer on the set of Paradox: A Rusty Lake Film (Image credit: Rusty Lake)
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"'Oh, and then we can do a Hollywood movie, and a TV show.'" Even after sitting down with director Sean van Leijenhorst, Looise remembers thinking: "Are we really going to do this? Because it was quite a big project, and it costs so much money, of course. "Years ago, we'd joke about it sometimes," Looise says. "At one point, he just sent us a comic-book version of Rusty Lake: Roots, and that blew our minds – you made this comic book out of nowhere?" It was enough to convince him and Looise to collaborate with the artist on their most ambitious project to date – 2018's Cube Escape: Paradox, a transmedia project which exists as a game, a comic book and a short film. "We became friends on the chat," Ras says. In the case of Hong Kong-based fan artist Lau Kwong Shing, those creations have entwined with the canon of the games themselves.
![rusty lake hotel rusty lake hotel](https://www.dounbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rusty-lake-hotel-apk.jpg)
"It's sometimes crazy to see what the community make." "That's something we never expected when we started Rusty Lake," Ras says. "From the beginning, we invested a lot in the community," Ras says – a lesson taken from his days running Flash portals – and they've been rewarded with reams of fan art and even the occasional tattoo. Throughout all these changes, what has sustained Rusty Lake is its fanbase. "It has this old Flash game vibe around it – people are publishing games really easily." Comics, films, and beyondĪ page from Lau Kwong Shing's Cube Escape: Paradox graphic novel (Image credit: Rusty Lake) "We really like that platform," Ras says. Rusty Lake expanded to Steam in 2016, the pair gaining confidence after a successful Greenlight campaign – "we were a bit surprised that people liked them on desktop, as premium games," Looise says – but the closest replacement they've found for the scene they both came up in is Itch.io. It had been releasing its games on mobile app stores from the start, Looise reckoning that they were a perfect fit "because they're so small and easily accessible for a lot of players". The studio wasn't entirely caught out by Flash's closure, though. When it comes to getting your game noticed, he says, "I think that it's a bit harder nowadays." "In the old Flash days, you published a game and then it would spread over all these portals, so it could have millions of plays within a few days," Ras says.
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Since then, Rusty Lake has bounced between free and premium games, continuing to foster a dedicated community even as the games' original home was demolished with the end of Flash – a slow fizzle that began in 2015, almost in step with Rusty Lake's debut, and was fully extinguished on New Year's Eve 2020.
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And Hotel did take a few months to find any traction with players, eventually bolstered by another code crossover with Cube Escape: Birthday, a freebie released the following year. Ras, Looise and the latest member of the team, community manager Andreea Bosgan (Image credit: Rusty Lake)Įven today, though, there's a slight nervousness in the pair's voices when they talk about taking this leap, a sense of needing permission from their audience to charge for their games.
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"But because we did it in all those smaller steps, it was not so stressful for us." "For us, that was not really possible." Taking that kind of gamble is simply too stressful, he says. "We see a lot of developers working for a few years on one game," Looise says. Effectively tying together six Cube Escape-style rooms into a single point-and-click adventure game, Hotel is significantly more substantial than everything that came before, but it's still a fairly slender project by the standards of most games – it was released in December 2015, eight months after the first Cube Escape, and just three months on from the most recent. Rusty Lake Hotel was the first game to bear the name of the studio and universe in its title, but more importantly it was Rusty Lake's first premium release. "We didn't have a good business model at all," Ras admits. The games had won a few cash prizes on Kongregate, while mobile releases brought in a little ad revenue, but this wasn't enough to keep the studio afloat. "But we also saw right away, we cannot do this forever." "We thought, OK, this is working well, we have established a community of players," Ras says. All the games so far had been released for free, in the hope of building an audience. By the end of that year there were six of them, and Rusty Lake was preparing to take its next step. The first Cube Escape games arrived in April 2015. Maarten Looise (Image credit: Rusty Lake)