So far we’ve been developing Class 3 Outbreak in our spare time, with over 2000 hours spent during the last 2 years. Our goal is to turn Binary Space into a business. We love making games, and want to be able to work on games like Class 3 Outbreak full-time. To that end we are looking to raise funding in several ways, one is through government grant funding, another is through crowd funding.
We’ve recently been awarded a couple of grants by South Australian government funding groups, which we are of course pretty stoked about!:
– $50k from the South Australian Film Corporation
– $10k from the South Australian Creative Industries Program
We’re in the final contracting phases on these, and expect to be able to switch into full-time development of Class 3 Outbreak from around June.
This will keep us going for a couple of months, but what then?
We’re using the IndieGoGo crowd funding website to raise money to keep us working full-time for as long as possible. So we are asking for your help to support us in our indie endeavors! If we reach our target of $50k, that will allow us to keep working for several more months, and put us on the path to being profitable and self-sustaining. But any amount would still be a big help – we’ll work for as long as we can afford, or work part-time.
IndieGoGo allows us to give away pre-orders for our game, along with perks if you spend a certain amount. All of the perks include free access to all of the paid features, as they are developed. So when we start charging our other players for those, pre-order customers get them for free. When we introduce virtual currency, we’ll also give you some for free. And of course, whatever amount you give us, you’ll receive our undying gratitude, for helping us make Class 3 Outbreak a reality!
Our primary plan to become profitable is to make Class 3 Outbreak “freemium”. It will always be free to play, but players will have the opportunity to purchase additional features if they wish. We’ll have a virtual currency via which you will be able to buy extra items such as weapons, and we will offer exclusive paid features as well.
To kick off our crowd funding efforts, we’ve just released a Royal Wedding map for the game. Saxon quickly coded in Prince William and Kate Middleton and some onlooking crowd members, and I drew up the Westminster Abbey map. Of course, zombies descend and make a mess of their wedding. We think it’s pretty funny, and so hopefully a lot of other people think so too. If it picks up steam and spreads then we will be very happy!
We have outlined a feature set for Class 3 Outbreak on the IndieGoGo website, head on over, check it out and please support our game. Thanks!
I’d like to share a brief history on Binary Space’s dynamic duo. Ok so we are yet to prove our dynamicness but our first game hopefully will! BS is coded and creativized by Saxon Druce and Jay Weston, both of us PC game developers from way back. We worked together at Ratbag Games on games such as PowerSlide and Dirt Track Racing from the late 90’s until the early naughties, myself doing art and game design for 5 years, Saxon coding until the coke ran out (a few years).
Saxon left Ratbag and continued coding away as a contractor for the intervening years at various places including the defense department and big name mining companies. I started a texture library company, Hyperfocal Design with another Ratbag employee. It took a few years to get going (because I was incredibly slack and poor at motivating myself) but is now a decent earner. Through Saxon’s contracting and my own business experience we luckily have some business sense and legal experience, which will always come in very handy.
During the last few years I certainly started feeling the creative itch coming back after being pretty burnt out and disenchanted you might say with AAA class games development. Plus while I’m quite happy with Hyperfocal, there is little in the way of creativity – its almost purely a business exercise. I actually made one possibly foolish attempt at starting a PC title, which I’m quite glad didn’t work out now, because I’m not sure I’ll ever be keen to lead a large company with many people’s jobs in my hands! That attempt got as far as getting funding for the concept phase but not much further.
At this time I increasingly found ideas for game concepts popping into my head, so I’d share them with friends between breaks in front of the 360, and thought how cool it’d be if someone made it. Yeah, the same old story with many gamers I guess. I’m not sure what actually changed to make me decide to give it a go for real, perhaps because the latest idea I had I felt would be so much fun… I’d also recently been forwarded or somehow came across a few flash games that really surprised me with their game play, graphics and cool factor. Two of those games were definitely “The Last Stand” and “Dino Run”. One of the best things about making small scale games like this is that you can make lots of them in a short time, and you aren’t constrained by publishers, deadlines, execs or existing IP/licenses. While I was a game designer at Ratbag, I realized that I wasn’t ever going to have the sort of creative control I wanted. Its just the nature of the beast. Now if my game design’s fail I have no one else to blame, however!
I had a pretty good look at various articles on the biz side of flash games (man’s gotta make a living somehow) and it seemed to be becoming reasonably profitable. So I thought to myself “I can’t code to save myself, making games is no fun on your own, and that Saxon dude could really code!”, so I emailed Saxon and asked if he ever considered making games again. The short version is he did, so we are. It’s good for me, because I’ll read the comments in his code (and even the actual code, which makes my brain bleed) and realize that few other flash developers would be so lucky to have someone with so much experience and coding skillz. And lucky for Saxon too I spose, cos programmer art is ugly!
So I think we have a pretty dang good team, and I can’t wait to show you our first game…
