When Geonhee Han, Sungjun Lim, Yewon Lee and Heyme Kim started working on Oh My Princess in their native South Korea, they surely didn’t imagine that they would end up spending three months in Vitoria-Gasteiz. It has been an adventure as exceptional as the story they want to tell in their game: to raise a little princess from childhood until she becomes a woman. All by completing match-three puzzles like those in Candy Crush.
With such an interesting mix of mechanics and genres, we couldn’t resist interviewing them to find out more about their project.
F2P Campus (F): How did the idea of Oh My Princess come up?
Cogoo (C): We came up with the idea around the end of 2017; we were thinking about it until March this year when we committed to developing it into a full game.
F: What’s the game about?
C: This is a title that mixes simulation and match-three puzzle games. The objective is to raise your daughter by playing match-three puzzles. You start at 8 years old and you can get up to 20 years old when the princess can get married and there is an ending.
F: What makes it special?
C: As I said earlier, the game’s objective is to raise your daughter until she becomes an adult. The game has an ending and you can choose who you want her to marry or who you want to be. There are a lot of different NPCs: you can choose to marry her to a prince, a knight, a thief… There are a lot of choices.
F: What’s inspired you?
C: There was a simulation game called Princess Maker back in the 90s. It was a big hit in Asia. In it you raised your daughter by teaching her and at the end you decided who she would marry. That’s where the idea came from.
F: Why did you choose free-to-play as a business model?
C: In our company we always make free-to-play games, so that’s what we chose this time too. It’s what we know how to do.
F: What did you expect from the campus?
C: We’re good at match-three puzzle games – we’ve already made five games of this genre — but we were not good at simulation games. This was a brand-new genre for us, so we came to the campus with the idea of finding out how to combine them.
F: What are you most proud of?
C: We’re really proud of making a game that mixes these two genres. This is a big challenge; we’re making something new that we hope is going to become a trend.
F: What has been the biggest challenge so far?
C: We had a lot of things to do. In simulation games, as you know, there are a lot of graphics and a lot of scripts that need to be done. This is our first time doing this type of work so it was hard and we needed to learn a lot.
F: How would you define the Cogoo team in one word?
C: Adventurous.
If you don’t want to miss any news about Cogoo and Oh My Princess, take a look at their website or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.