Edmonton indie game developers find success par for the corpse

Posted on January 30, 2014 By Jeremy Loome Comedy, culture, Entertainment, Front Slider, Visual Arts

central character whose comedic deaths could be used by his successors as a prop to help navigate a side-scrolling platformer — the term for games like Super Mario Bros., Braid, Limbo and many others.

“Two of us knew each other already but other than that it was the first time the four people in the core team came together,” he says. “We had a lot of success coming out of that weekend, with just the little bit of work we did there being well-received, and it sort of grew from that into a portfolio piece, then a hobby project at night and on weekends, and then eventually into a company with a full commercial release.” He’s skipping a few stages, of course, but Johnson is well aware the team has had incredible good fortune: a core idea that was so well received, many of the barriers indie developers often face have simply disappeared.

“We started with the game jam, and then we went to a bunch of Startup Edmonton events and got a lot more support and feedback, which was really helpful,” Johnson says. Taking the game to a variety of industry and trade events and entering it into contests brought plaudits from the gaming press.

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Then the team won a character design contest which landed them a meeting with Valve, the influential game developers who created the Half-Life franchise and the online download service, Steam. Valve’s people liked the game’s concept and progress so much, it offered Steam up as a distributor, allowing Life Goes On to bypass the “Greenlight” application process most Steam indie games must go through.

With so much of the game already done by that point, Infinite Monkeys didn’t even have to pursue crowd funding to finish the job, and the full game is tentatively slated to be released in a few months. If it’s the hit the gaming press expects, Johnson says, the team is full aware they may have a full-fledged gaming studio on their hands. If the game produces enough revenue to make it an ongoing business concern, there are already some team members, Johnson says, who have big ambitions about what to take on next.

“As a pragmatic business aside, I should note that I think the second project should probably be smaller,” he says, noting how much more the team faced that it had initially expected. Don’t expect their ambitions to outstrip their reach, however. “I think we have a good attitude towards that sort of thing,” Johnson says.

Poor Sir Reggie, however? Well, he and his replacements outstrip their reach regularly. In Life Goes On, sometimes the only way to get ahead is by stepping on one.

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