My Game Dev Story

Over the last year, I’ve been asked on several occasions how I’m progressing with the challenge of transforming my vague ideas into successful, playable games. Let me tell you what I’ve learned: being the CEO of a multi-million pound game-development house is no picnic!

As you all know, ever since Animal Blast rocked PCs early last year, Game Crazy Games’ rise to fame has been near-meteoric. But despite our company pulling in enough bucks to ruffle some serious feathers over at Rovio Mobile, it might shock you to learn that we had many embarrassing failures before we finally hit the big-time. Even though it seemed like a no-brainer, the masses didn’t respond well to our first title, the animal-themed FPS Animal X-ing. Somehow, Animal X-ing 2: Nook’s Revenge fared even worse, and the company was pushed to the brink of financial ruin.

I mean, it was tough at the start. With only three employees and little capital, I had to be careful how we allocated resources. Our prodigious programmer, Anne Droide, managed to pick up a lot of the slack in quite a few ways, but the company layout changed dramatically at the beginning. I’ll not mention the name for legal reasons, but I made the tough decision to ditch our sound-guy early on. Frankly, he wasn’t very good. What kind of sound engineer just waltzes up to your desk and asks to risk valuable development resources on graphics, anyway? He didn’t even know what a C64 was! Martin Galway would be disgusted.

Eventually, by means of online recruitment campaigns and enlisting a friend of my secretary, we managed to find the perfect mix of fresh-blood and industry veterans. Following the Animal X-ing debacle, we took some quick government contacts for mascot and character design to build some capital. The team were still pretty demoralised, but I perked them up with some Dead Bull. It’s amazing what an energy drink can do – we completed the contracts ahead of schedule. With renewed confidence and spirit, we were finally on our way to laying the groundwork for Animal Blast.

And then fate intervened. My secretary booked us some time off from development to head to a press event, where the Exodus was finally revealed. Barely a week later, we managed to get a meeting with a head Senga exec; not only were they were impressed with our contract work, but they liked our back-catalogue, unsuccessful though it was. Securing a dev-kit, we switched our target platform for Animal Blast and the rest, as they say, is history…

It’s difficult to say what the future holds for Game Crazy Games. As CEO, I can say with confidence that we remain committed to producing high-quality, innovative game experiences. However, we’re thinking of migrating onto other development platforms and expanding our workforce, as it’s no secret that the Exodus’ position in the marketplace is growing stagnant. There will no doubt be significant challenges, but we-

…wait. You guys weren’t talking about my experience with iOS/Android game Game Dev Story? You were asking about something else? Uh, my mistake.