In the game

A passion for classic video games brought two entrepreneurs together, and now a work of their own delivers both a look back and a taste of the future, Eric Jou reports.儲存 In a homey threebedroomapartment in the northern outskirts of Beijing, three programmers type code on dualmonitored computers. An artist dabbles at a digital masterpiece magnified by the computer screen, and on the sidelines, creative director Zhou Lu listens to the latest change in themusic. In this apartment is Onipunks Studios, an independent videogame developer on the verge of shipping its first game.However,unlike traditional developers, whether indies ormainstream, Onipunks crowdsourced with KickStarter. comto finance its debut. The brainchild ofBeijingborn Zhou and artist Mu Fei, Onipunks began life as Zhou's graduateschool projectwhile hewas studying in Paris. "Myprofessor, insteadof giving a final,hadthe class apply the use of artificial intelligence," says Zhou. "So formy project, Imade a game." Throughhis finalproject,Zhoureachedout to artistsbackhome inBeijing forhelpandeventuallywas linked to his soontobe artistic director Mu Fei. After the project was finished, Zhou shelved the product andwent on to findwork in the Francebased company AnkamaGames. "Most people burn out in the industry after a fewyears, but forme itwas amatter ofmonths," says Zhou, who soon left to pursue computerprogramming work in Canada.Meanwhile,Mu was working on his own projects back in art school, as a 3D contractor for animation companies and commercials. But before long, Zhou decided that gaming was where he wanted to be after all, and he reconnected with Mu. The duo decided to take what they loved about video games and make something that they would enjoy. The result was their first game, Crystalides. "Wewentwith a scifi theme. I preferred scifi — I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, martialarts fantasies and the like," says Mu. They rounded out their team by hiring a programmer andamusician—the latter turned out to be a childhood friend ofMu. As Crystalides progressed, the littleknown duo failed to getmedia attention for the project despite winning independent developer awards. During this time, Zhou was still working full time in Canada. When the opportunity for CWars came about, Zhou had quit his job in Canada to pursue the gamedevelopment dream. Mu also devoted his time to working on CWars. Both young men grew up in Beijing playing video games. Zhou was a PC gamer, recalling such games as Tapper and QBert, whereas Mu was a console gamer whose favorite game as a childwas SuperMario Bros. Their passion and history playing video games led to the art direction for Crystalides, and the selling point to their newgame CWars. Work on Crystalides had progressed to a point where the game was playable, so Onipunks picked out the best part of the game and expanded on it. They used and extrapolated on a retro pixelart style,where each image ismade up of block迷你倉 built upon blocks. Learning from the problems of Cyrstalides, Zhou turned to a site thatwas exploding online, KickStarter.com. That popular crowdsourcing website allows developers, inventors and the like to circumvent traditional forms of fundraising in favor of asking themasses formoney. Unlike in traditional means of investing, a Kickstarter's intellectual property and other rights are retained by the creator and the backers only receive "rewards", such as Tshirts and posters, based on how much money they put into a project, not shares or dividends. With the game direction set, the KickStarter was launched in April of 2013. The team set a funding goal of $30,000 just to finish the game, and stretch goals to add features to the game if the stretch goalsweremet. The relatively unknown team from China, with a demonstrated concept and retrostyle art, brought in more than $95,000, enough money to put their games onto consoles. Video game consoles had been banned for legitimate sales in the country since 2000, until a recent suspension of the ban earlier this month. Despite the ban, Zhou and Mu were still avid gamers. Zhou says his first fond console experience was on the original Sony PlayStation, whereas Mu points to the Nintendo GameCube, which he purchased with his own money. "The thingwas perfect," he says. "It had Nintendo games (such as Mario, Zelda and StarFox) and a little handle to take it around." With the KickStarter success, the duo had a golden opportunity: to create a game for Nintendo andSony.While theywere effectively only "porting", or making their game playable on a console, they were still able to attain licenses to develop for consoles. Developers looking to make games for consoles require special consolehardware that they can test andwrite the games on. This hardware is called a development kit and to normally obtain one, one requires a license. "When we reached our stretch goals for PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS andWii U, we were ecstatic" says Zhou. "Mu was excited because our game would actually show up on a Nintendo system,whereas Iwas blown away by the fact thatwewould showup on PlayStation." Zhou explains that Onipunks chose to use KickStarter because it would attract international attention. In 2013, KickStarter launched many highprofile videogame projects such as theOuya. Zhou says that a lot of the peoplewho support KickStarters are gamers, developers andmedia people and that really helped attract money to their kickoff. The duo credits much of their success to the art style of their game. "We're lovers of retro games, particularly games that invoke nostalgia," says Zhou. "A lot of people say our game looks like Fire Emblem and Super Robot Wars, and we tell them that they're correct. We want them to see these games, we want them to feel these games, because we want to bring them back to a time when they had fun playing these games of old." Contact thewriter at ericJou@chinadaily.com.cn. 儲存倉