Alumni Profile: Daniel Haynes
Tranzfuser Project Description
Shuttle Revolution is a cartoony 2.5D badminton fighting game. Rally the shuttlecock back and forth to incredible speeds, aiming to K.O the opponent or sink it into their stage to break it.
The colourful and punky cast all have unique abilities that set them apart, which they use to ascend the ranks and shoot for the title of Supreme Badminton Champion!
Quick Q&A
If you could turn the clock back, would you do anything differently?
I’d have set in place and made clear to the team when work hours are and when you shouldn’t be expected to work. In the lead-up to our public showcase event, we had a pretty demoralising crunch work environment due to the stress of wanting to make the game perfect.
Set out what hours are for work and which are not to be and make sure everyone understands that – don’t take your work home with you mentally.
What made you want to take part in the competition?
We believe we had an interesting student project that would be great to see further developed with a budget, as well as having a unique enough premise that we think it could do well in competition. Anything else was a bonus.
Why should the up-and-coming game dev talent of tomorrow apply to Tranzfuser?
For the up-and-coming game dev team who each is fairly financially stable for at least some months after university, Tranzfuser is really the perfect next step. It allows you to take a good project and develop it towards a vertical slice with a decent amount of funding and full creative freedom. It taught us how publishers work and how to pitch as an indie studio.
It also gave us in invaluable industry contact, our facilitator Tim, who we still talk with to this day.
What benefits did Tranzfuser bring to your game dev career?
Tranzfuser taught us to graduate from a student mindset into a business mindset. The context of the competition gave us a great opportunity to think critically and hone our teamwork towards deadlines. The constant deliverables got us warmed into the flow of the management side of things too – very much reminding you that not all game dev is the game dev itself.
Post-Tranzfuser, our same flow of development continues, just with the added legal considerations of owning a business.
What are you doing now?
After our Tranzfuser win, we spent time ripping out old systems and renewing them as well as adding some new characters and features. We also fully transitioned into a company via Companies House and started looking to get ourselves a publisher to fund further development.
