- Killer Kenn
Hey, want to hear a story? Thought so.
One time, I spent about 5 years making a triple A game in my garage. Ok, so it was really in my living room, not the garage, and it wasn't really triple A, but that was sure the plan.
I didn't work on it full time during the 5 years. I was working for other people at the time. But every night and on weekends, I'd force myself to turn on the computer and chip away at it.
I finally got it far enough along that it was playing pretty well, and even though the art wasn't super beautiful, I figured any publisher would be able to squint and see through the place holder art and catch the vision of how truly amazing the game would be.
So, I bought my tickets to E3 and called Microsoft telling them I had a game that would knock their socks off. They set up a time to meet with me and said they'd have dev kits there for me to use to show them my game.
As I arrived I was so excited. I kept thinking of how impressed they'd be that I had made this thing in my garage, er... living room and kept imagining them saying things like "How much money can we give you to make this thing become a reality?"
When I got to their booth, E3 was just wrapping up. I went to talk to someone at their desk the nice receptionist-ish lady told me to wait while she went and looked for someone to meet with me. I was expecting Bill Gates, but sadly, it wasn't Bill. Heck, it wasn't even the President of the Xbox division.
I sat there and watched while a few of them argued over which one would meet with me.
"He made it in his garage? Why don't you take him?"
"His garage? No, YOU take him."
"I know, let's have Bob do it. Bob'll meet with anyone!"
They were kind enough to have me meet with someone who had at least seen other people work on games though.
I still wasn't discouraged. I imagined that after I showed a few minutes to this guy, he'd go running off excitedly to fetch everyone else, including Bill himself.
I boldly told him that I had been making a triple A game in my spare time and that I was hoping that they would want to publish it.
I saw the guy sigh as though he'd been told this a thousand other times by dudes almost as hopeful as I was.
He started in on his lecture about how Triple A games cost millions of dollars, teams of 20 or more people make them. They go through these things called "crunch times", yada yada yada.
I had worked in gaming for about 10 years, so I already knew what "crunch time" meant, but I patiently waited as he left no room in the conversation for me to explain any of this.
He finished up his lecture by saying "Maybe you could show someone your demo and get a job?"
Now that I had a spare second to talk, I told him I'd been working in the industry for a long time, and that this demo worked on a dev kit and that it would say everything.
"Well, we already took our dev kits down." He explained. He then went on with his lecture, but I can't remember anything else he said, because not being able to show what I had sacrificed so much on for years was a little discouraging.
So, the lesson to learn from this experience: "NO ONE believes you can make anything decent in your garage (or living room)"?
It seems to not matter how cool or impressive your demo may be, if can't at least appear to be a stable, capable company, you'll have a REALLY hard time getting anyone to take you seriously.
Update on Kenn: Our preliminary tests on our art style and rendering method are looking promising. I don't want get my hopes up too early, but I have a good feeling about where we're heading as far as the art style is concerned. Maybe I'll have something to show soon.
Here's a delicious pic. It's a first pass model of Kenn's truck.
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