Interview with Christoph Bornschein

Can you please introduce yourself and tell us what are you doing exactly for Kickster Online at Frogster Interactive Pictures AG?
Christoph Bornschein: My name is Christoph Bornschein and I’m responsible for the whole Kickster project at Frogster. The main part of my work is the online-strategy and all means that we build around the game itself. Just in order to name an example let me explain that we’re planning to evolve our website: www.kickster.eu to a social network and give our players the possibility to show their player avatar in networks like Facebook or MySpace.

How big is the Kickster’s developer team?
Christoph Bornschein: As Kickster is developed by CR Space in Korea this question is difficult to answer for me. I’d say the head-count of team-members goes in the hundreds.

What is Kickster Online Street Soccer, what features make Kickster different than the other Football games?
Christoph Bornschein: The main difference between Kickster and many other football-games is that Kickster is online-only and that everything in this game is focused on competing with other human players. Kickster has a really authentic street-soccer setting. There are two game modi 2on2 or 3on3. Every player on the field is controlled by one gamer except the goalkeeper. So everything that is happening in this game is controlled by real players whereas other games tend to have a lot of NPC-characters in there.

Moreover Kickster gives the player the possibility to use principles known from MMORPGs. It is a main element of the game that you level up your character and try to gain special skills and abilities for it.

Are you going to produce Kickster Online also for Association Football (11-a-side – not street soccer)?
Christoph Bornschein: No, as stated in the question before the number of players taking part needs to be reduced because of fun reasons. Having eleven players on the courts might quickly end up being quite hectic and is no longer fun to play. As you would only control one player at a time – other players might be left doing nothing for some time. With up to six human players on the court, everyone has to stay focused and act according to his personal class and position.

In a trailer we can see some skill moves, how easy is that to perform an acrobatic move in the game?
Christoph Bornschein: On the one hand the special skills in Kickster are very easy to perform as there is a keyboard-command for those moves. On the other hand it takes you quite a long time to improve your character unless you’re allowed to acquire those special-moves.

How about a Kickster offline (retail) version in future?
Christoph Bornschein: We’ve already discussed that but we’re not sure yet, We are going to ask our community for feedback on that question soon. What we’ll definitely do is a cover-mount-distribution on game-magazines.

Is there any page at Kickster.eu website to receive feedback or suggestion from the gamers for the next version of Kickster?
Christoph Bornschein: As Kickster is an online-game, you don’t have to wait for changes until a next version is being sold in stores. We’re able to patch the game any time we’ve changed something. So go ahead and tell us what you’d like to have in there here: www.kickster.eu/en/forums/community/feature-requests

Any plan to develop Kickster for other platforms like PS3 or Xbox 360, or even for Mac OS X?
Christoph Bornschein: MacOS is very interesting for us,,but that will have to wait some times still. It also depends on the success of the PC version.

You are surely a football fan, what team do you support?
Christoph Bornschein: Personally I’m a fan of Union Berlin. That’s one of the smaller but very tradition-steeped clubs in Berlin. Unfortunately they are not playing in the German Bundesliga at present. But hopefully they will again in some years.

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