When I was 9 years old my favorite show was Clarissa Explains It All. I couldn’t relate to the 16 year old girl coming of age bit at all, but I loved how she made her own video games. As a 9 year old child with no brothers or sisters and 2 working parents, I played plenty of video games, and thought it would be a fantastic way to express my likes and feelings (seeing as I was already old enough to know I had no artistic talent whatsoever). I spent almost 2 months designing a video game, planning out characters, drawing out maps, writing out the step by step chain of events, and so forth. When I was 11 years old, I actually made the game with a simple RPG builder on my 486 computer.
When I was 19 years old, I was attending Berkeley as a Computer Science major. My freshman computer teacher took special interest in me and would frequently call me to the stage of our 400 student class to talk about my projects. I had 3 websites running, a full time business on eBay, and was earning about 30 dollars a day running bots in video games.
At 25 I jumped into Second Life. I had leased 50 sims (which were $1,650 USD to set up and $295 per month each), and was the #1 search result for every scripting/programming/design related keyword for 3 years running. I hosted the Linden Labs Havok4 physics team, and was the first and only person to crash a Havok4 sim during the “Crash Havok4 Marathon”. You can still find my work all throughout the virtual world, powering ATMs, on Paramount and Cisco sims, as well as in the bullets of about 1 in 5 guns fired.
Earlier this year I started designing APPs. With no experience in Objective-C and having not touched ANY C based language in almost 10 years, I very quickly learned the syntax and within 2 weeks had posted my first APP. I now have 2 more on the store averaging 3-5 sales per day.
Around 2 months ago an independent movie studio saw one of my games and asked if I could come up with something to coincide with their next movie release. They initially wanted to pay a small amount of money to re-skin one of my existing games, expecting that game design would be quite slow. I had already been planning my next game to be a new genre that’s a blend of Arcade Shooter (shoot off the screen to reload!) and Tower Defense with RPG elements driven by a collectable card game, and using the sci-fi setting of their movie would be perfect. In under a week, before our negotiations were finished, I had a basic gameplay demo in their hands using still images of some of their concept art and they loved it.
So I’m providing the code, the code is done but I keep thinking of new things I want to add. They are providing the graphics for the levels, animations, aliens, marines, radars, and guns, which they have planned out to finish in August. What I need to come up with is GUI for menus/buttons/cards, an over-world map, and any sound effects and music.
This is where I’m stuck. The movie studio is making a really nice film, and having a slick game to compliment it is a good opportunity to really establish my game company. A fun game with ugly menus, no music, and cheap sound effects isn’t going to cut it. I’ve spoken to a designer that I’ve worked with numerous times since 2007 and a local musician who has already provided me with some free samples, and I’m confident that with $4,000 USD I can fulfill my vision. Lacking the funds, the game will still be finished and released, but I fear it won’t be taken seriously.
Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/877838677/help-me-finish-breach-my-4th-app-for-the-app-store
