Alexandre Amancio has a resume that speaks for itself. This native of Braga, who moved to Canada with his parents when he was just three years old, has already held positions as art director and creative director for several games from giant Ubisoft, including popular titles like Far Cry 2, Assassin's Creed Revealed and Assassin's Creed UnitHe led teams of more than a thousand people. Now, the former Ubisoft veteran will lead Elipsis, a new video game studio based in Portugal.
Currently, Alexandre Amancio is Vice President of Intellectual Property Strategy at FunPlus, a Swiss company specializing in video games for mobile devices (responsible for popular games such as State of Survival, Frost and Flame: King of Avalon and Sea of Conquest: Piratesamong others). But FunPlus' plans for Portugal are different.
“Let's say the studio will have two heads. On the one hand, we will develop intellectual property and collaborate with other FunPlus studios to help develop these properties. It's not just building universes, but developing universes into other products, such as comics, movies or series. We have world-class people here in these fields and “the other part will be developing our own properties in creating games,” explained Alexandre Amancio, who will lead the studio, located in the Fintech House, in Lisbon, in an interview with. IT exam.
Elipsis Studio starts with nine people already hired, including some Portuguese who have “already worked on some of the biggest games of the last 10 years, such as star wars and Avatar“, and also foreign experts who moved specifically to Lisbon because of this new project. The plan is, over the next three years, to increase the number of people working in the Elipsis studio to 50, as revealed the person in charge.
A plan that represents ambition
Alexandre Amancio was the first to take this step, when he moved to the Portuguese capital a year and a half ago. “We love the energy of the city and the countryside,” he reveals. He tells us that he saw a spirit very similar to that of Montreal, Canada, which in a few years would become a global reference for video games, attracting large-scale companies and being the cradle of many successful video games.
“I would like to do the same thing [em Lisboa]. “Bringing in people with great experience and then developing local talent here,” says the FunPlus CEO. But with one caveat – he believes it's possible to make games with a global projection, but without the games or the ecosystem itself growing to the point of losing identity or becoming hostage to that broad scope. “We want to make gaming on a smaller scale – where people can come in and enjoy for an hour or two and get satisfaction without having to play for hundreds of hours. We are seeing a shift in gaming. The industry is adapting to new trends.”
The first “Made in Portugal” project is underway. Elipsis has already created the so-called “bible of the game world”, which practically creates the foundations of the story, characters, mythology and other elements that will form the basis of the game. “It's a deep legend that we're creating, it's unique,” says Alexandre Amancio. “The games we will make are PC games, but then they will move to consoles and perhaps mobile devices. (…) I can say that it will be a completely original product, it will be more than just a product, and it won't be long before we start talking about it. I can To bring you more news next year.
But the studio doesn't just want to focus on video games, it wants to have a cross-cutting presence in various entertainment media. Hence the need to create a starting point, such as this Bible, in the most complete way possible, so that it will be easier to create new stories later, and explore different means of publication. “The story we will tell in each medium is made for that medium and we will be looking for people from that medium,” he ensures. In fact, Elipsis' first project was designing a comic created by FunPlus for a smartphone game Sea of conquest.
Now, the goal of FunPlus and Alexandre Amâncio is to ensure not only the success of the project – the executive did not want to reveal the value of the investment made in Elipsis – but also that Portugal is a country with increasingly more opportunities for those who want to work in the video game industry. .
He added: “There is a lot of talent here in Portugal, there are people who are passionate about the Games and some leave the country because they cannot find opportunities here. There is talent so that more companies can come here.”
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