GDGi recieves Telefilm funding for Debut in-house title
GDGi are also proud to announce that we have recieved first round Telefilm funding for our debut in-house IP, titled 'My Rock and Roll Life', which will begin it's prototype phaes of development in early August. Here's the official 'blurb' about the title:
Delivered as a combination of an episodic series as well as an interactive 3d game, 'My Rock and Roll Life' lets the audience become the Rock and Roll star that they always wanted to be. Combining Reality TV show style 'behind the scenes' interactions with 'Real-Life' rock personalities and virtual characters and situations, 'My Rock and Roll life' is a unique blend of fantasy and reality.
The game will be developed using our next-gen game engine 'Beyond Virtual' - GDGi will be posting additional news about the project in the coming weeks.
after 6 years of developing games with zero money, and spending the past while developing contract games for other people, it's nice to actually get a bit of funding to work on our own game...
I'll keep everyone posted about the game's progress...prototype will be in development through january or so...
Sounds like a fun game. When it's available, I'll give it a shot.
BTW do you get to customize the band and the type of music you play? It would be really cool if you actually had to play the instruments (by pressing keys and things like that) Sounds like a challenge to me.
Yeah that's the idea - it's not a 'dance dance' type of game, but you will actually be composing the music on the fly using tony hawk style combo's and so on...
Don't want to say too much about it before we get things farther along, but it combines story elements like gta where you walk around meeting & creating your band, and you will be 'jamming' with the AI characters to write the songs, play 'live' as well as creating videos etc.
All i have to say is that we attended E3, we attended GDC, and saw more uninspiring game designs, uninspired characters and boring games I ever could have thought.
It really makes me sad when I teach game design courses and talk to new game designers and all everyone seems to want to do is redo the latest game that has been spit out by the large commercial companies.
I have seen so few games that are even slightly innovative or interesting over the past 4 or 5 years that it really made me rethink everything I have wanted to do from a game design perspective.
I put this out to a challenge to everyone working on RF games. You need to sit down and seriously look at what you are thinking of spending the next few years of your life working on - is it worth just creating another clone of an already successful game or game genre?
There is no point trying to redo Half-Life 'only bigger and better' - Valve is already doing that themselves and failing.
There is no point in churning out the next FPS or 'Army guys' shooter, you are doing the same thing that EA does with their sports titles (and now every title).
There was an article that came out recently that mentioned that EA has 26 games coming out this holiday season. Only 1 is an original title.
This is pathetic, and very sad if this is the state of the Game Industry as a hole.
Is not the whole dream of being an Independent that you can take chances, do something different?
The reality is that as an Independent, you absolutely MUST do something unique and stand out from the crowd in order for anyone to notice what you are doing. Without the multi-million dollar marketing budget to promote your game, even if you DO finish your game (which is a near-miracle in action), there is almost zero chance that your game will get out to the people that would want to play it.
This is why Alien Hominid stood out so much and got so much press at this year's IGF - they had the gall to make a 2d side scroller game on a modern console. Whodathunk it?
If I'm going to spend 2 years working on a game and all of the hurdles that it takes to get the game funded and developed, the LAST thing I want to do is create another bad clone of a game that has already come out 500 times before.
This is where the original inspiration for this game came from. It took me many months of brainstorming and looking at what game ideas might work and might not work before I came up with something that seemed remotely feasible, technically and also innovative from the game design perspective.
This doesn't mean that you should 'stop' making games - this is what RF is good for - while you are developing your ideas, test them out with RF. You can create small prototypes very quickly to give your game idea the walk through the paces and see what works and what doesn't work.
This is where ColdWar Crisis came from - while I was planning the idea for this game, I created that 3 level FPS game to test out features and ideas in RF - i knew i needed lots of cinematics, so i created a bunch of cinematics in RF. I knew i wanted to use normal mapping & advanced features, but didn't know enough about them, so I made sure to do alot of experimentation and testing with the normal mapping in RF.
I also created the 3rd person game 'ZombiCity' at the same time, which was another experiment in the large outdoor urban environment, which was also another main goal of the game idea.
And so on...RF's beauty is it's rapid development process. Once you get a hang of putting games together with it, there really is no limit to the ideas that you can put together very rapidly with it.
Something else that I discovered while I was creating these prototypes is that RF, while great for prototyping, would not be suitable for the kind of game that I had envisioned for this game idea. This is one of the reasons I jumped at the opportunity to acquire Beyond Virtual's technology from Veggie Games when we had the chance.
Things are about to get very interesting - and we're just getting started ;}
Great idea!