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Hi, please introduce yourself and tell us about your background in the games industry:
My name is Jens Bergensten and I’m the lead programmer and co-founder of Oxeye Game Studio. I’ve been making computer games since 1998 and worked for two years in the industry at Oblivion Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden. Creative freedom and "doing your own thing" has always been important to me, and that’s one of the reasons me and my friends decided to try the life as an independent game developer.
What inspired your latest game (The Strategist), and why did you decide to make it?
Ah, that’s a long story. The original version of "Strategist" was created during the Christmas holiday in 2003 by me and a friend. We had played a very crude little strategy game and thought "this could be done so much better" and started working on a simple test version. At that time we made the game only for ourselves and didn’t think much about usablility or graphics. The game turned out to be quite fun to play, but not very pretty.
At this time Oxeye was about to get started and we needed some kind of game to put on our website. I made some modifications and added some features, but the game’s presentation was still rather poor. It would take more than a year until we sat down and actually made a decent version of the game. This was released in autumn 2005 as "version 2". The graphics and user interface had been improved and it looked more like a real game.
We made a couple of more changes, hoping to improve sales, but nothing really major. The big changes came when one of our members said, "I think it’s a shame that we don’t push this game harder, if only more people knew about it more people would enjoy it too". At this time, two other things had changed. First, we had started working together at an office and secondly we wanted to start making Mac games. The decision was then to make a really throughout update of "The Strategist". We added better graphics, more music and a whole new main campaign. So you could say that the development of the game was actually the result of several smaller decisions rather than one big one.
Can you explain what the game is all about?
In the game you take the role as one of the "Union’s" new "Strategist" commanders. Your job is to move troops and attack enemies in order to achieve certain objectives, usually defeating the opponent’s command centers. When the story begins you have almost finished your training, you only need to complete one more practice fight with another Strategist called "Ricks". However, during your training the base is hit by gas missiles from an unknown enemy, and you become in charge of rallying the troops and defeat the opponents.
The game itself is played as a turn-based strategy game, where the playfield is divided into regions. Troops can usually only be moved to adjacent regions, but you can also build harbours to move them across water or use a special command called "Chopper Transport" to move them even farther away. What makes the game so fun is that you have to be careful when you move your troops so that they don’t get hit by a powerful counter-attack but still are in such position so that they protect the regions you own.
Another key element of the game is your turn actions that are used to attack or build with. If you control more command centers you are able to perform more actions every turn. It also means that if you lose all of your command centers you will be unable to do anything and is thus defeated. Command centers are also used to activate special "command actions" such as "Propaganda", "Blitz", "Destroy Development" and (the already mentioned) "Chopper Transport".
How long did it take to develop the game? Any big problems you encountered during development?
The development time has been spread out on several separate occasions. This new update took the longest, about 4 months. In total you could say that the game has taken 7 months to make.
I can’t really think of any bigger development problems, except that we had to skip the Linux version for now. We hope that we get some time to create it later on.
When was Oxeye Game Studio formed, and have you released any previous titles we don’t know of?
We formed Oxeye Game Studio during the summer of 2003. We haven’t released any other games but we have made a lot of smaller prototypes. We will work on "Dawn of Daria" now and maybe make a real game out of one of the prototypes later on.
What’s your favorite casual game at this time?
"The Strategist", haha! No, but I’m currently playing "Chocolate Castle" by Lexaloffle. I’ve bought quite many shareware games lately and I think my all-time favourite has been "Pax Galaxia" by Dio Games. At least if you count the number of hours I’ve spent playing that game.
We noticed you guys are working on a game called "Dawn of Daria", when can we expect this game?
Yes, we call it our "MMOFL" (or "moffle" as we say at the office), "massively multiplayer online fantasy life". It looks like a RPG but – ironically – we are aiming to make a game that has a wider spectrum of achievements than you usually find in RPGs. Trade, item production and social relationships will be important, and experience levels have been replaced with social status and faction rankings.
"Dawn of Daria" will take a very long time to develop, but we will release it in several smaller steps. The plan is that the next version will be released by August this year (2007) for everybody to try.
How do you see the future of casual games?
I believe that casual games have a strong future because the Internet allows users to easily find and play new games. I’m not so sure about the independent casual game market, however, with strong participants such as Steam and Games for Windows are expanding their markets.
Thank you for your time & good luck in the future!
Thank you! 
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Interview with Jens Bergensten
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