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Ruffian puts Game of Glens on ice: “Exactly what we do with Game of Glens next is undecided”

Game of Glens put on ice

Ruffian is taking a break from development of its 2D tower building strategy title, Game of Glens, a month after the peculiar Square Enix crowd-funding marketing project, Collective, concluded its pilot phase. 

When presented along with two other hopefuls, only 40 percent of voters said they’d back something like Game of Glens. In comparison, 90 percent of voters wanted to back Tuque Games’ World War Machine. 

While Ruffian didn’t succeed in the pilot phase and is stepping away from Game of Glens, producer Jim Cope still has a positive outlook in regards to the scheme. “We’re really glad Collective has opened fully and look forward to seeing what comes out of the process,” Cope told Eurogamer.

“We’d encourage other developers to give it a go. Of course, we wish the best of luck to everyone at Tuque with World War Machine during their crowdfunding phase. Being part of the Collective pilot was a really constructive exercise and we learned a lot from it.

“Obviously we would have liked our Game of Glens pitch to fare better but we still believe in it and think we can still find the right audience for the game. So exactly what we do with Game of Glens next is undecided.

“We’re pursuing a number of options and are giving it a bit of time to follow those up. That breathing room plays as an advantage to our other, bigger, projects which are keeping us really busy and are shaping up really well.

“Wish I could say more about those now but give us a few more months…”

Square Enix’s Collective is an unusual scheme. Instead of the masses telling Square Enix what title they should develop, they vote on pitches from other studios, which may end up getting put on the Collective’s indiegogo campaign page, ready for crowd-funding backers.

With the pilot phase concluded, any developer can submit a pitch, and if it passes the submission criteria check, it could get posted by Square Enix for people to vote on. New pitches will be posted every Monday, starting this month.

Surprisingly, Square Enix is going to make some of its own IPs available, starting with Gex, Fear Effect and Anachronox. Bloody Anachronox. A while back I said that the Ion Storm-developed RPG was one of the 15 best RPGs on PC and that it was a tragedy it never got the sequel it was leading up to. But I’m not sure how I feel about a new game in the IP that isn’t designed by Tom Hall.