He attended talks and heard from his game development heroes. As a treat, his family thought he'd benefit from traveling to the source of the global game development pulse to be a part of something bigger. He'd spent the past two years developing games in China where, despite the rapidly growing local scene, it was still very much isolated from the global game development community. In Christmas of 2010, Ma's brother and parents chipped in to buy him an all-access pass to the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. They felt like they were onto something, even if they weren't yet sure what it was. Over the months the two developers would discover a love for board games and working on their own projects - it didn't matter that the games were small and didn't lead to anything bigger, or that few of their game development peers cared for board games. The games themselves weren't remarkable, but he found that he was getting a sense of satisfaction that he wasn't getting working at a big studio. Ma would go home and work on little projects in programs like GameMaker. After a full day of coding and designing massive projects - some that would see the light of day, some that 2K would cancel before announcing them - the two would play board games. The more time they spent at 2K, the more they realized what they wanted to do - or more specifically, what they didn't want to do. "Not the level design or anything," he says. Over two years they'd work on games like Top Spin 2 for Wii, help design 2K's social games and, in the case of Ma, work on BioShock 2's maps. to China for their first jobs in game development. He'd stay for the next two years.ĢK Games was Davis' and Ma's break - the two packed their bags and moved from the U.S. Ma was brought on as a temporary junior game designer. The studio found itself needing a designer who could do a bit of everything. 2K turned him away.Ī few months later, they asked him to come back. But when asked what he wanted to do, even he couldn't say. Ma presented himself as someone who could do a bit of everything: He'd edited maps in Team Fortress 2, he'd done some 3D modeling, he'd designed games in his own time and he could program bits and bobs. If you're a 2D artist, that's the only thing you do." "So if you're a 3D artist, you only do 3D art. "China is a place where they basically hire someone for a specific purpose," Ma says. The Kickstarter campaign did the opposite of fail. The developers didn't set out to make a commercial product backed by tens of thousands of people. It didn't have fancy graphics or promise a product so enormous that players would need to hook car engines to their computers to make it work. In many ways the Kickstarter campaign should have failed. "I mean, everything logically seemed to check out and it seemed like, 'Yes, this is technically what is happening in reality right now,' but part of it didn't feel that way. By the end of 24 hours, they've raised double what they asked for.īy the end of the Kickstarter campaign, FTL raises 20 times the funding goal. At the end of 12 hours, they've met their goal. Every few minutes, the Kickstarter page automatically updates - a few dollars here, a few hundred there.
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