5 Questions - Hans Frontosa, Interstudio
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Original date:Â September 15, 2005
Who are you, what's your company and what games do you make?
My name is Hans Frontosa and I'm the creative director of Interstudio, the company who created Lovechess. Before Lovechess we did several non-erotic games. These games were not intended for the general market; we developed them for educational purposes for different clients in the Netherlands. Lovechess is our first worldwide release, available online as a download and boxed version. The boxed version is also distributed as a retail version in German-speaking countries and Russia. The website of Lovechess is at http://www.lovechess.nl
Tell me a bit more about the game.
Well it's a chess game, a bit like Battle chess from the old days, but instead of battle, there is sex when the pieces meet. That's the basic idea, the whole setting is done in the Greek era, inside a large temple and the chess pieces are the Greek and Trojan gods, mainly to make the whole atmosphere of the game more playful and a little lighthearted. We did not want it to be a raunchy game, more a classy one, so the whole Greek setting was a good starting point for us.
Is there anything that's surprised you about sexual content development? Something you didn't expect?
The fun it was making the content :-) We are relatively serious guys over here at Interstudio, but the view of my colleague playing with a broomstick in front of a mirror to figure out the right sensual pose was really amusing. Another thing I didn't expect was how fast you get used to making sex animations and watching your reference material. We were also surprised to see that about one third of our customers are female. We thought erotic games would only be bought by men.
How can one include sexual content in a game and not make it cheesy?
The first thing I can think of is be creative and use your imagination. Sex scenes can be beautiful if you consider the whole form of the couple as the most important thing, not the explicitness of the scene. In Lovechess you can see the whole thing, but while creating the animations we always tried to look at it as a whole.
What's the best use of sexual content you've seen in a game so far?
I consider the hunter animation by Joe Williamsen as top notch, in both erotic expression and animation. The hunter Animation has been featured several times, in different versions, on our site The Art of Love.
