Hello everyone! First of all, I'm sincerely sorry for my weirdo English which may cause troubles for some of the readers but I'm pretty sure that everyone understand (almost) everything or at least get the main point of my saying.
I'm a game developer, I'v been working inside game industry (in Finland) for approximately two years. I'v worked in various project, but the one I'd like to mention must be AirBuccaneers which got greenlighted in Steam while ago and got released just couple of days ago. In this project I worked as an 3D artist and Project manager. Now at the start of December I decided to start building a company of my own. Fortunately I didn't have to start doing this all by myself and one of the company (which I left) employee started this journey with me. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the company in which we were working, but we had this burning passion to work with games which WE love to work with. The whole point is that we want to have fun while doing these games, not only when playing the complete build.
Our plans is to move in Southern-Finland and start to run my friends cafeteria during the Summer times. From this, we get enough cash to eat and sleep (kinda) comfortably but ALSO do game development during the off-season! Because of our cafeteria work, we dont have to stress about sales of our games or such things, which normally make new game companies struggle in pain. We started to work with our first project right after we stopped working in the other company. Right now we are doing design while our programmer is creating the main parts for our first game. Unfortunately our programmer isn't able to work with the project after January, 2013. Hopefully we get our main parts of the game complete and we can start work with the art right after that.
So, right now you must be thinking that ”Why the hell is this guy telling this?” The reason why I'm here is to tell everyone of our existence and hopefully we are able to start forming some contacts and maybe even a small community to throw around ideas and opinions for the projects which we work with. Our main goal is to work with the projects openly and be honest of our doings and show work in progress stuff for public. This will of course lead into situations of some people saying ”why that look so damn stupid” , ”thats like ten-year-old art!” etc. But hopefully there are a lot of people, who understand that even in game development, everything is unfinished before being finished, not to mention polish stage!
So if you are intersted in contacting fresh new game company, feel free to send me email! (klaus(dot)kaariainen(at)samooja(dot)com)
Our company name is Samooja and we have formed our homepages while ago, these pages can be found from the following url: http://samooja.com/
Right now we are working with a small game project called Purify: The Ascend. I actually wrote a feature text of Purify just while ago, and this is the first thing in which I need ideas, feedback and opinions. I'm going to copy-paste that right next:
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PURIFY: THE ASCEND
”You may have heard someone once saying that you see bright light in the end of a tunnel before you pass away...” ... ”In these forsaken tunnels, that light is the only reason you keep fighting.” - Reynik Miller. Survivor from 'Realm' recolonize spacestation A/01/02 (RESPACE A/01/02)
Spaceship crash landed into a foreign planet. People was able to survive the crash because of succesfully launched escape pods. Unfortunately some of the survivors landed into deep caves of the planet, straight into the abyss. Your journey towards the surface may begin, search for a light and be prepared.
Purify: The Ascend is an arcade style ”Clicker-FPS” with RPG elements and randomly generated levels. Your goal is to survive the journey up to the surface from the forsaken caverns of a foreign planet. Fortunately you have found necessary equipment from the caves, which will definitely help your struggle.
Key features:
- Randomly generated matches from a massive level library
- Over 30 unique items to customize your character
- 20 unlockable spells/abilities to anhilate your opponent
- Lots of different enemy types
- Graphics handmade for you, with exceptional love
- Unique boss levels
- Customizable difficulty level, which will affect the visuals of the enemy
- Unlockable character classes
- Choose your own way: build up your character using different items, spells and abilities
- Worldwide highscore lists: Do you have what it takes?'
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Feedback would be awesome, when writing feedback think things like this:
- After reading this text, am I interested of this game?
- Would I search more information of this game after reading this?
- Would I buy this game?
- Was the text interesting? (Yes: Why? No: Why?)
So yeah, we wont be doing all of the listed features before the end of January! That's for sure. But like always, we will be adding missing parts while the time goes on.
If any part of this post made you interested of our doings, please contact us or just follow us quietly from some dark corners but I REALLY hope the first one.
The best way to follow our doing is via Facebook http://www.facebook.com/SamoojaEntertainment but for direct questions or giving straight feedback feel free to send email for me!
NOTE: To be honest, I posted this same post in multiple forums and I'm pretty sure that I wont be able to follow all of these. Seems like I'll stick our GameDev.net and of course, in Samooja Facebook / Home page / Email
PS:
Musics for our game will be done by very, very talented guy: Zimpzon. Here is one example from him, which he created for one of our projects (The "Newb" project is currently on hold)
Best regards,
Klaus 'Kossad' Kääriäinen
Founder of Samooja
