REPUBLIC OF JUNGLE
Republic of Jungle is an online formatted social deduction game developed and published by Gerdoo Games. In a party of 5-10 players, you must either tear down the political establishment or keep it strong. Choose a political bent—are you a Loyalist or a Leaker? Republic of Jungle is aimed at a full release in Spring 2022 on Steam.
PAX WEST 2021 INTERVIEW
Kasra Rahimi, Co-founder & Co-creator of Republic of Jungle, with Taztdevil3
Taz: Tell me what game you’re working on and what is your part in the development process.
Rahimi: Sure, so our game is Republic of Jungle. I am one of the co-founders and co-creators of the game and I’m mostly focused on doing programming and game design.
Taz: Can you give me a small summary of your game?
Rahimi: Sure, so it’s a five-to-ten-player social deduction party game. It’s a crossover between Jackbox Party Packs and classic social deduction games like Werewolf Mafia, Resistance, Secret Hitler, those type of games. Same as Jackbox games, one player as the host player only needs one copy of the game for the whole group, and they can run it either if they’re playing in person, they can run it on a TV and then everyone joins using their phones, or if they’re playing remotely, they can just share their screen on a video call like Zoom or Discord.
Taz: Awesome, that’s great. I know you kind of listed off some games of what the game is kind of like, but what would you say inspired your game the most?
Rahimi: Sure. It’s hard to only name one game. I think it’s two games that inspired us the most.
The first one is a tabletop game called Resistance Avalon. The basic mechanics of the game are inspired by Resistance Avalon. We try to add newer mechanics and features that were not possible in a physical tabletop platform with that game, and improve upon the game design for that game because the digital platform enabled us to do so many things. The second game that inspired us was Jackbox Party Packs. So like, we used to play a lot of hardcore social deduction and tabletop games with our friends and at some point someone introduced Jackbox Party packs to our group. And since it was super convenient and accessible to like, run and play, at some point we saw that people were always asking to play Jackbox. No one wanted to play those hardcore games anymore, and that was when my business partner and I were like, “What if we bring our favorite midcore to hardcore games to this platform?” And that was when this happened: we decided to work on the prototype of Republic of Jungle, and after a while we saw a lot of potential and we decided to quit our full time jobs and work on this.
Taz: That’s awesome. I love hearing stories of people that are just like, “I want this game, this game doesn’t exist, so we’re just going to make it.” I love that. That’s awesome. And especially as convenient as something like Jackbox or something you play virtually and not necessarily in the same room, but you can play over Discord call or a Zoom call like you mentioned. I do love hearing stuff, especially with like a pandemic going on, you know, it sucks, but you can still enjoy games with your friends and that’s awesome.
Rahimi: For sure.
Taz: If you can, go back and begin again from scratch, would you change anything? And if so, what would you change?
Rahimi: Let me see, that’s a good question. So we like one thing that we had a hard time with was playtesting. I would have started playtesting the features we wanted to add to the game as soon as and as early as possible. Initially, when we started working on this game, we were like coding everything, making the digital version of it, and then we started playtesting and we had to throw a lot of things out because we didn’t know it’s not going to be fun, right, until we playtested them. But we had the opportunity to playtest them using a physical, paper prototype without even coding and making sure everything works online because there’s a lot of networking on the back end. So, one thing I would have changed is that we should have started the playtesting process much earlier—much earlier, and much more like, nondigital if that makes sense.
Taz: Yeah, for sure, for sure. I forgot to ask, how long have you been developing this game?
Rahimi: So we’ve been developing this game for a year and a half. We quit our jobs in April 2020, but before that we’d been prototyping different ideas as a hobby in our free time for maybe two and a half years before that. But the main process started like a year and a half ago.
Taz: And how many people are on the team?
Rahimi: Right now the main team has five people, but we have some contractors that are helping with audio, music, voice acting, those kinds of things.
Taz: Oh, OK, cool, so you haven’t really had a problem with outsourcing?
Rahimi: No.
Taz: Okay, that’s awesome. Love that. What’s been your favorite part of the development process?
Rahimi: My favorite part about the development process are the brainstorm sessions, mostly about game design. When we sit down and talk about different features and mechanics we want to add to the game. I always love the brainstorm sessions. Like when you have a small idea and after talking about it for like half an hour to an hour with other people and hitting off the idea from each other, and brainstorming, it becomes something really good. And then you get to playtest it and see if it’s working.
Taz: That’s awesome. And this is kind of like an off script question: I’m curious, what inspired the theme of Republic of Jungle in terms of the animal usage, the type of animals. What inspired that? Who came up with like, let’s do it in a Zootopia kind of way. How did that go down?
Rahimi: So we wanted to do a political satire game and we felt like the theme, especially at the time that we were developing this game, was kind of depressing for people and it was too serious. It wasn’t that funny, as funny as we wanted it to be. And then my business partner, Moein, came up with this idea that what if we make everything about animals in an alternate universe? It’s a tradition of having animals in political cartoons in Europe and also in the US. We saw that there’s a lot of potential there. Like, we were looking at some New Yorker editorial cartoons, and also other magazines, and some online cartoons, and we saw the animals are used a lot in political satire cartoons. So we also talked to our artists and we decided to go with this. And it looks like it’s working. People like it and even though it sometimes gets political. But because it’s all about animals and it’s an alternate universe, everyone is happy with it.
Taz: Right, there’s some things to say about what’s going on, but you know it takes the tension off. Everyone is just having a good time. It’s funny.
Rahimi: Yeah.
Taz: OK, that’s awesome. Love that. And then last question: is there anything else you want us to know about your game?
Rahimi: Sure, so we’re on Kickstarter right now. We have a free web demo during our Kickstarter. It’s going to be a limited time free web demo. Right after Kickstarter, we’re going to send all our backers a key to our closed beta, a Steam key to our closed beta, which we’re going to push updates to as we develop the game before the launch of the final game, which we’re aiming for spring ’22. So yeah, if you like the idea, go on our Kickstarter. You can try our free web demo and then if you like the demo you can also consider backing us and supporting us.
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