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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: The Ball
Being a giant, beloved video game site has its downsides. For example, we sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we're giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with Sjoerd De Jong, Project Lead at Teotl Studios, about how his team has spent one-and-a-half years polishing The Ball. Joystiq: How did you or your company get started? Sjoerd De Jong, Teotl Studios: Our game started out as a mod for Unreal Tournament 3, and was originally made for Epic Games' Make Something Unreal contest. Our first version was released in May 2008, and it was received so well (double first place in the first round of the contest), that we decided to carry on. We continued working on our project and we regularly released new versions all the way until the end of the contest, one-and-a-half years later. By the end of the contest The Ball had secured five first places, and won the second place in the Grand Finals. That gave us the confidence to quit our day time jobs, and start up our own small game development studio: Teotl Studios. We used the money we won throughout the contest to fund our company, and we have recently also been awarded a government grant. We are very happy with that, it has given us some financial stability and allowed us to get this far with no publisher or investor breathing down our necks.
