SIPBLOG: Learning the business – 6/21/21

Hi! We’re Team Custard! That’s Brandon #1, Brandon #2,  Shirley, Liam, Matt, Cal and me – Jen! Besides Matt, Shirley and Cal (who are Comp Sci, Bio/Japanese and Scoring majors, respectively) we’re all Game Design or Production majors! We come from Becker->Clark, Swarthmore, Northeastern, UMass Amherst, Berklee and NYU and have a ton of experience designing and developing games. Our unanimous new experience working at MassDigi is the focus on not just creating, but publishing a game. Here we feel compelled to work hard and to develop a polished game ready for release in a way that is not “mushy”, where our educational experience so far focused on churning out projects we like quickly.

Rather than creating passion projects, Team Custard was told to kill our darlings. If we loved an idea too much, we would baby it. If we babied it too much, we wouldn’t be able to make the tough decision to rework things if the game was not fun. In Team Custard, there is a thick atmosphere of mutual respect for both developer and game. We work very hard to give ourselves and each other due respect and motivate each other to do our best. Together we killed lots of darlings, from plants who rescue an ecologically ravaged Earth, to robot birds spying on humanity. In the end our best (and most marketable) option was House Haunters, the Rock Paper Scissors game about exorcising furniture to sell haunted houses.

Over the first month of MassDigi’s Summer Innovation Program, Team Custard learned so much. As a team of extremely cool and talented student professionals, we (and our game), are taking steps out of the educational nest and into the world of the game development industry. College is a wonderful place to grow as a person and in skillset. MassDigi is a great place to learn to make a game from a business minded perspective. In the wise words of Shirley, “Yeet.”