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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: High Flyer Death Defyer
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Game Mechanic Studios founder and creative director Jason Alejandre explains why freefalling is a great way to feel truly free as an indie developer, with his latest title, High Flyer Death Defyer. How did Game Mechanic Studios get started in development? In 2008, Jeff Hua, Henry Ji and I left EA and started Game Mechanic Studios and we really had only one goal-to create games that make us smile and have fun doing the jobs we love. To get to that point we prototyped a lot, dreaming up a bunch of different original games and pushing ourselves to innovate and think creatively. We immediately started working on creating original IP, kind of modeling ourselves after the beginnings of Pixar. Once we had something we were truly proud of we set that as the bar for all the other games we were developing. We probably had about 30 different game ideas that were each developed to various points, so by having that quality bar established we could immediately see which ones out of the 30 were worth developing further. We ended up with about four ideas we really wanted to pursue and one of those was High Flyer Death Defyer -- which we just recently released and are currently working hard to update.
