My Guests Today
Dave Proctor from Mighty Yell, who are making The Big Con: website, Steam.
Steven Smith from Lightning Rod Games, who are making A Fold Apart: website, Steam.
Notes, Links, and Corrections
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Dave grew up playing adventure games like Monkey Island and Loom, created by Lucasfilm Games and released in 1990. That same year the studio rebranded to LucasArts.
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A Convertible note is a bond that can be converted into shares (or equivalent cash) at some future date. Useful when the company is hard to valuate. Learn more from seedinvest and from Wikipedia.
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Xsolla Funding Club “We connect indie developers with capital and technology to self-publish their video game.”
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The Canada Media Fund supplies $353 Million annually to support Canadian television and digital media industries. Another example of CMF’s funding is 2019 TV Series The Boys, which was produced in Toronto.
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CMF is funding jointly by broadcasters and the federal government. The CRTC obligates companies like Bell, Shaw, and Rogers to pay into the fund. Source: the cbc
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Ontario Creates is similar, but focuses on growth/culture only in Ontario.
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A Fold Apart received some funding from both of these initiatives.
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FTL’s Kickstarter was in March 2012.
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The Oculus Quest, a modern VR headset that doesn’t require sensors on the edges of your room.
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The Oculus Quest does not require a PC, but it can be connected using a USB-C 3.0 cable. Oculus calls that “Quest + Link”.
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Alan Wake is “a video game that feels like a short story that’s presented like a television show” (source). It earned #1 on Time Magazine’s top 10 video games of 2010.
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Runbow is “the party platformer you’ve been waiting for”. One of the only shared-screen, 9-player games in existence!
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l’éléphant et l’astronaute is a game of elephants with jetpacks and astronauts with swords.
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At this point it starts to hail outside our window. Thanks Dave and Steven for braving the weather to be guests on this podcast!
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Evolve PR handles video game PR exclusively. Their personality shines through on their website. One of their selling points is, “we try not to suck”.
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Contruct is a powerful game creation tool designed specifically for 2D games.
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GameSalad is a game development platform, and a good way to learn game design/creation. It has been used in multiple top games on the Apple App store.
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OGRE is an open-source rendering engine. A rendering engine (aka renderer) is 1 of many pieces in a game engine.
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The above engines/renderers were mentioned in the podcast, but both Dave’s and Steven’s current projects use Unity 3D.
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Part of Ontario Creates is the Interactive Digital Media Fund. Part of that is the [Global Market Development] fund (formerly the “export fund”), which helps companies attend international events, like GDC.
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The IDM Fund hosts a pre-GDC meetup to ensure studios get the most out of GDC. That’s how Dave and Steven first met.
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Rewired is an advanced input system for Unity. It boasts an impressive set of features and both Dave and Steven have good things to say about it.
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Shout-out to Game Dev Cafe for being a source of inspiration.
Closing music: Good Kid - Faster. Listen on Spotify, Youtube