Copying from Kickstarter Update
Hey everyone Andrew here, aka Mrawolf....
I just wanted to talk a little about how Slain! and I came to be.I have been making games for years. I made my first game, which was just a bunch of text strings, on a ZX81 when I was eleven years old. Even though we had no internet connection, as there was no internet, I managed to fool my parents into thinking I had hacked into their bank account and was transferring thousands of pounds into the account. Then, a message came up saying I was being traced and the police were on their way. My parents flipped, and I thought it was great fun! From that point, I knew I wanted to make games.
At that time, computer magazines contained pages of code that you could type in to make your own games. I would buy the magazine, spend my time typing thousands of lines of code into my Spectrum, and give them to my friends to play. Once again, great fun!
I left school when I was fifteen, and had several jobs before I managed to get my first job in the industry at Imagitek Design at the age of nineteen. We worked in an old mill house in the North of England. I became a sprite animator there putting my training in martial arts to good use and learning all I could about games, art, and life. It was an invaluable experience.
I quit working in the mainstream games industry about four years ago. The industry, to me, had become stale. At that point, I was making assets from other peoples’ concepts for other peoples’ games. I was essentially, a 3D printer producing game-ready art. I missed small, effective teams, where I got to design, build, and animate my own creations. And I was tired of being told, “Andrew, I think this is a little bit dark, can you make it more...um cute?” About two years ago, I started designing Slain! which was then called The Seven Towers. I wanted to make a dark, Gothic, side-scroller using pixel art influenced by the music of Metal. I had made many games back in the day using pixel art and I wanted to do all the things I could not do back then using today’s tools and Fxs in an old-school looking game.
So, I set off on my adventure into indie game development. I spent many days alone in my room cranking out art to the sounds of Candlemass, My Dying Bride, Katatonia, Anathema, Iced Earth, Entombed, Bathory, and Satyricon, to mention a few. After about a year of work, Slain! was starting to gain some interest from the right people. It seemed others were also in to dark games, Metal and pixels. So my direction changed a bit, to not only make the game for me but for others who shared my love for these things.
Of course, I could not do this alone and finding people willing to leave their cushy industry jobs to work with a wild-card developer was difficult. I would show all my friends my work on Slain!, and ask for help with the code side of things, or the business side of things, so I could focus on the art and game. Then one day my good friend, Asa Dang, gets back to me and offers to help! Shortly after, he left his awesome job at Rockstar to work full-time at Wolfbrew, bringing with him years of coding experience and an unusual tolerance for my personality. Around the same time, I was approached by Nick Alfieri from Digerati with an E-mail that said something like, “I want to have sex with your game.” This was the final piece, Nick bought his business development and marketing skills to Wolfbrew, allowing us to focus on making the game.
We are now running a Kickstarter campaign to fund Slain! for a few more months and test out the market to see what the gamers think of Slain! I hope you that gave you a little insight to the origins of Slain! and we hope to see you all in the Slain! community soon. Thx
Nick here now! I also posted this on our blog last night, please have a look through it...it should give a little bit of an explanation on why our tiers are as they are!
http://www.wolfbrewgames.com/slain/kickstarter-update/
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