Alumni Profile: Matthew Baldwin
Tranzfuser Project Description
Insubordinate is a single-player rogue-lite shooter where the player must fight their way up the corporate ladder, one crony at a time. The player controls Blair, and must make use of the supplies around the office to help takedown her evil bosses. These weapons include staplers, laser pens, glue guns, explosive printers and all manner of office knick-knacks. By the end of Tranzfuser, we put together a full demo of our first level to showcase everything we had put together in our 3 months since beginning the project.
Quick Q&A
If you could turn the clock back, would you do anything differently?
If I could turn back time, I’d make sure that people make it clear if they’re looking for an industry job. It caused a lot of turbulance within our team when our team leader had to switch over due to them getting a job that wouldn’t let them continue in the competition. So my best advice to new teams is, if they can, hold off on trying to find a full time job during the events of Tranzfuser.
What made you want to take part in the competition?
I decided to participate in Tranzfuser, as it allowed me to help in forming a team of people who were passionate and excited to begin work on a funded game project. I felt that by doing this, it would allow me to build skills and also make up for my own weaknesses in other areas by learning from my teammates.
Why should the up-and-coming game dev talent of tomorrow apply to Tranzfuser?
Tranzfuser is great opportunity for future game developers to connect with like-minded devs and artists within their local hub. If you feel like you have a weak spot, this competition will help you and your team learn and work to make up for that weakness. By the end of the event, its likely that you and your team will have become close and want to continue working on things together, even despite any setbacks you faced up till that point
What benefits did Tranzfuser bring to your game dev career?
Tranzfuser helped me to decide to pursue a career in Independent game development and partake in far more networking events than I ever did before. I got to learn much better and more efficent methods of coding from my team that lead to me improving my own work. I got so much insight from the speakers and those involved in Tranzfuser about how myself and my team should go about setting up our studio. Finally, the best thing it gave me was a team of friends I thoroughly enjoyed and continue to enjoy working with.
What are you doing now?
Myself and my team continue weekly meetings to discuss our weeks development on our Insubordinate game. Development has become quite laid back and we’ve been working on getting the gameplay feeling as best as possible before we continue deeper into developing further components of the game. Currently, the team has been experimenting with differing methods of procedural generation, new weapons and a much improved tutorial system. Additionally, the team has began a mobile side-project called Doodle Course. It is a simple puzzle game about guiding a bee through a world of arts and crafts. So far, we’ve been adding ideas we think of during the week to a Miro and then deciding during meetings which ideas are worthwhile to include. Finally, the team has began to partake in team building game nights. We’ve been using these nights to record small extra videos for our social media accounts, a form of helping our followers understand and know the people who work on the game.
