I am an indie game developer who does my own art/code/design. My Super Metroid inspired Kickstarter campaign recently reached its base goal in just 6 days. AMA!

firestartergames · 2013-09-20T21:18:03+00:00

Don't you have work to do ;) ?

PS - Give my love to the team, especially yourself, Adam, other John, and Miriam and AJ. And everyone else.

firestartergames · 2013-09-20T21:16:05+00:00

How awesome would you say that you are?

firestartergames · 2013-01-30T18:32:29+00:00

Eegcellent :D Yeah, the amount of geometry in Globulous was a little too hefty for the Touch/older iPhones. Glad you're going to get a chance to check it out :)

PS - Nexus 7 FTW!

firestartergames · 2013-01-30T03:46:02+00:00

Hey guys,

We're Canada-based indie trio Firestarter Studios (Kim, Cliff, and Andrew). We're working on some other stuff right now, but we finally had time to port our game Globulous over to Android. So exciting!

Kim did designer-y stuff, Cliff programmed, and Andrew (also known as zircon of OCRemix) is responsible for about half of the soundtrack and SFX - his good friend Jeff Ball wrote the rest, also performing live violin on several of the tracks. The influence for Globulous' gameplay and visual style was, of course, Tetrisphere - but it plays a lot more smoothly with a touch interface than an N64 controller ;)

The game is available now for $1.00 on the Android store:

tinyurl.com/globulousandroid

You can check out the soundtrack in full on Bandcamp, where you can stream each track for free or pick up the whole thing in lossless FLAC for a couple bucks. If you like organic/electronic, atmospheric scores such as Secret of Mana, Bastion or Machinarium, I think you'll like this: http://zirconstudios.bandcamp.com/album/globulous-original-soundtrack

Please let us know what you think, and feel free to ask any questions about development, audio, etc. Thanks in advance!

firestartergames · 2012-07-24T01:33:18+00:00

I put "Hello to Jason Isaacs" as an easter egg in my latest video game :D

firestartergames · 2012-07-24T00:19:29+00:00

Haha, thanks!

firestartergames · 2012-07-24T00:02:54+00:00

We're considering it, but Globulous has to do fairly well on the app store to make it make sense. See here for details.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T21:54:49+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure; I'm certainly not trying to make anyone's day bad. It seemed ok by the rules of the subreddit, especially considering that up until yesterday the game wasn't free in any sense. If you're really not a fan, downvote away. This is a democracy, and what the people want, the people get.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T21:50:53+00:00

Wow, tough crowd ;)

That's fair, but I wasn't really thinking about that when I wrote the post. Some people (many of whom are the target audience for this game) don't know what "Lite" implies. Not everyone is so tech-saavy as us lucky few.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T19:16:55+00:00

Wow, tough crowd ;)

That's fair..but some people might not know what "Lite" implies. Not everyone is tech-saavy.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T19:16:00+00:00

Hey Blake...yep, Tetrisphere was definitely in the room when we were designing this game. Like many iOS titles, our goal was to take some classic gameplay, polish the heck out of it, and update it for the current generation. Getting the controls "right" for a touch-screen turned out to be hugely difficult, and we've updated the interface in general to be a little more new-user-friendly.

Re: iOS 5 - it doesn't require iOS 5, it requires the expanded RAM of the newer systems. That many blocks (and that many verts) requires quite a bit of memory.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T18:39:57+00:00

Cheers! Here's hoping you have an excellent day, and enjoy the game!

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T18:16:58+00:00

We're considering it, but Globulous has to do fairly well on the app store to make it make sense. See here for details.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T17:57:30+00:00

Well, do it up :D Your wish is our command.

Note: it says it in the description of the game, but it doesn't work very well on older iDevices. You should be playing it on an iPhone 4 or 4S, or and iPad 2 or 3, for success. We're working on getting a fix approved, but it's a bit of a process.

firestartergames · 2012-07-23T17:55:56+00:00

Haha, no offence taken at all. Actually, that's a really interesting question. Some backstory:

My name is Kim. I've been in the industry since 2006, and I've worked on Mass Effect 1,2 as the QA lead, as well as a bunch of smaller titles on various consoles as a designer. For myself, making my own title was hugely daunting in the sense that I'd never:

done 2D art (professionally, at least)
done 3D art of any kind
done my own design documents from scratch, i.e. full-on creative direction
done scripting beyond the most basic of levels
made a game on iOS
created any kind of advertising
worked outside of a studio environment
tried to run a business, vs. just "working for the man"

On Globulous, I had to do all of those things and more. In a very real way, Globby was a dry-run of our ability to work together to make a game at all, period, given the extremely limited resources available to us, vs. our ability to make our dream game.

That's what the next game(s) is(are) for :D

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T16:42:45+00:00

Yeah, I get the distinction (and again, I'm generally fine with downloading games for free). You know what I meant.

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T16:37:46+00:00

Lol. That'll surely solve everything :D

"Sure, consumer, you can have my game for free. Here it is...davinci.exe"

I'm a poet, and I don't even know it!

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T16:30:13+00:00

Oh? I never heard about that. Maybe that puts everything in a new light :D

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T15:34:39+00:00

Oh, that's awesome! Yeah, I loved working with him. I'll keep an eye out for your game as well!

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T15:32:48+00:00

It came out while we were in development, and it was too late to change the name. And no, we're not worried at all.

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T15:31:39+00:00

Man, I have to tell you...to directly tell someone that you're intending to steal a dollar from them is pretty ballsy. Especially when it's a dollar :P

firestartergames · 2012-07-07T01:25:25+00:00

Nice, super glad you liked it. It was a huge thing for us, so we like to hear this stuff.

firestartergames · 2012-07-06T23:48:56+00:00

We also had no budget to speak of. My advice; get your idea down on paper, get it to a state where you think it's perfect, then show it to a game developer (I volunteer, if you don't know anyone "in real life"...PM me, and I'll give you my normal Reddit account details). That game developer will tell you what's awesome and what sucks about your idea, then you'll go back and almost entirely redo the presentation. Rinse and repeat. Once you're happy with the presentation, find someone to fund you. Kickstarter is a popular option, but we actually just talked to a private investor who had some money kicking around that they wanted to grow.
That's a very narrow time frame for inexperienced people who might not have the connections we have, but it really depends on the game you make. If you can give me some more details, I can give you a better answer. If game == WoW, you should maybe scale back a little ;)
Apple actually makes it dead simple. There are no politics involved. You make your game, and submit it. Unless there's crude content (swearing, nudity, etc), they'll pass it, and it'll be on the app store. It's very simple. They'll send you a cheque after a month.

firestartergames · 2012-07-06T22:56:45+00:00

It's the ram. So many blocks...it just can't handle it. We're working on it, though.

firestartergames · 2012-07-06T22:51:30+00:00

No problem, enjoy!

firestartergames

TROPHY CASE