Transhaping – Kickstarting with meaning

[Music] right so we're trying we're Unbound interactive I'm Tim Harrington I'm select team Lee then lead programmer on the project and then I'm the community manager and lead designer of the products not format the slides apparently but it's not that important it's fine first off just who we are we are yet with very small team just free of us coming from Stefan University brush throughout all of our second year of university we're thinking like I've got placement coming up what are we gonna do

and then sort of coming together as friends throughout the year talk to each other we saw how you came to this idea of what we really cool would be if we went ahead we made our own mark we went out there we did something important he cared about so we still came to this idea of formulating an indie studio so this pretty much where the idea formulated and that's what we're doing right now yeah sorry and specifically for our game we really wanted to work with the trans community because to the members themselves of the team being trans themselves and not a lot of people do community in general it was sewing really wanted to work with and share with people and coming up we've got a sort of hope it's gonna work properly of this so early in the works of trailer for the game will hopefully

have the soundtrack playing as well she really wants that truck but there's no way she'd be allowed it in this binary world everyone to see so wars ones and zeros but isn't it really surely that can't be all there it is [Music]

so Trenton so trans - is a puddle of platformer games a side scroller it's to raise awareness of issues that trunk judge people face on a regular basis it follows the story of a shape of which you design the character as or what it looks like basically who it's struggling to accept who they are you get to fight or follow them from finding themselves all the way to fully transition this all about the story of our company really and sort of where we were coming from so but if you want to work from our own

experiences so Jane and i'ma civically just waiting to use their own experiences to try and help Nonie showed that there are people out there like who through transitioning and stuff and me don't have support out there they don't know what people are going through it why - may close them there are people out there have these same thoughts go through these same experiences you know I just sort of help them with that and we also saw wanted to help for people that had want trends maybe they don't understand the issue there's a lot of just people not understanding or ignorance going around about the whole issue of transgender so we want to just assign that kid maybe educate as well for people that don't already know we also have to think about the scope of the game when we're making it so we knew from the start

many of us we're not dying experienced or we're a fresh team and we've got like I don't know like a year maybe before we have to start thinking all right we need to get back to our education finish this off ready keep taking anything further so we wanted to create something we could put together in that time frame so meet from the start we're thinking all right design we want something simple we can put a lot of character into and we want again prospective make something short and digestible so like to free our long experience something which we could feasibly develop in the timeframe we have and then also this other stake Kickstarter when we were as we need to cash your funding for our game a lot were for support from the University and after that we absorbed on our own so we end up going to Kickstarter and through that met some really great people who helped us out showed us sort of peel wushu gave us

tips on the campaign we just helped us get off the ground and it was only a small amount we were asking for we didn't manage to get it like a leaf just a bit over free grand for the project while it was still very early in development very happy of that and people may have known like just from looking at if you've played twice was alone quite big influence I guess for us so we did get a bit of a nameless which yes is a actual tweet directly from Mike before who sort of found out about our project so we want you to try and shape him to be our first game because we wanted to make an impact not only from on in the games community in the games industry but also outside of that we wanted to use the funding that we did have to help other trans musicians and

voice actors and a bit of money for it and we also wanted to use our platform tea to raise money for charity because this year's been a huge issue even today trans people in America have been banned from the military so we always money for charities to help that kind of situations alongside it which would raise money for the charity charity Trevor projects and we raise about a hundred dollars for that all right so the challengers face right away stying off had a massive challenge but I swim at one boot or mastering second year had this group of friends there were six of us UNR is there's only three of us right now on the team that's a situation out of control people's hands I was ready to blame for anything so it was just we set the business plan already like work like distributed amongst the six of us and then finally came to launching the company and we had half the manpower we

originally planned to have and so melee we have to just plug all these holes in our business of like all right we no longer have the person we're gonna have who was sort of like our business it's like fists like more charisma than me so they want to come out and like handle stuff and we had a person who had more experience with game design pacifically and with them leaving that put a lot more work on Ryan immediately this was a big problem but we kind of manage to work around it but so I got round to shining our partnership agreement we saw of predefined roles who was going to do what and we saw it's like won for being close rented I think it's helped us get by with how to take on a big workload from having to manage making the game advertiser design work top of that

happier everything to do with it but yeah we've been getting buying mostly just because we really cared about we're making now a big problem was this whole idea of turning a hobby into a broth which I still wouldn't say we've necessarily done properly but it's just this idea of turning like past experiences of game jams of all right big crunch period Shaw spent ages will appear on the same weekend and that's fine I can just relax and it's fine that's out of the way now - all right I've got to show up every single day put in like minimum likes six hours or a day trying to divert this project and we all the other stuff that so just managing a team I'm trying to put into practice at our development practices like scrum just and also like the whole being self-employed managing your a business side of it dealing with

business taxes and that's all comes down the line it's so much work and see the challenge was really trying to take on this new workload and take on this new mindset of working for it like one thing we were worried about is because what we're working on is unfortunately still controversial for some reason some people so we were worried about backlash or anything you might get for designed to work on no transgender honestly since we started the projects everyone we always come across has always been really supportive friendly always just helping us out and mary had any problems that also been really surprised and happy about that fact yeah maybe when we get bigger maybe and more exposed maybe we'll get some of that but I think based on the positiveness we've already received from the star of this that we were to just shove that off and not have it affect us

after house has been so good so we expect the game to be released next month about mid next months making this game missing this games had its challenges it's good moments but we know we can hopefully an impact on the community and also the transgender community does anyone have any questions so now I'll ask some questions anyway because I think obviously I watched you guys after you launched your Kickstarter I mean that's - I've done that myself I mean we worked on the Rocky Horror Show and we ran a Kickstarter those it's a huge amount of work how did you kind of did you know what you were going to expect when when you start the Kickstarter yeah we have like ideas about alright marketing plans like I would post updates on course on little streams show the game going along and stuff like that as we go throughout and then we start realizing how much what we

have to do on top of that actually sort of get noticed especially when we have this find people that we should be talking to you to get the wrong exposure and stuff like that yeah we realized there was a lot more to it than I initially thought and so it's no joke hopefully stick with us now because you kind of jumped in at the deep end don't you you've left your styling your first company together you're starting on your first kind of game together and you've got all the challenges that goes with that plus you're running a Kickstarter yeah and I mean did you think about you trying to go for investment or is it it's the kind of game we think that might be too difficult in the current economic climate we we all see we if the Hicks I've fallen through we probably looked at investment stuff is this the case of we were very new to business so here you know where we were standing when it came to investing and such so we didn't really want to take on work and chih-wei talking veces I might expect see like a monetary that like

conversation and stuff so that's why - was Kickstarter will work when I see people will expect the game product from us and and everything else we trick with it but that's fine we won't do that anyway there's no like extra obligation of our we will return to you 20,000 pounds or whatever we've seen no businesses like that but we don't really want to wouldn't that mean it's like if your first project is challenging to prove a track record when you first approached pigs after all I mean how prepared did you think you were and obviously coming out from doing something to a certain extent do you think that kind of gave you what you needed to get started or was it more about the hobby experience you guys had before you engage with this game I mean I had first off when I was initially as a website developer for the company I do website in University and that is my thing and then people left and I was like well I guess I've got a due to the design aspects of it and I've got to learn all of these new things in the first like month suppose even producing

the game yeah I the course itself was pretty good like we did learn some stuff for businesses and like agile opponent practices and stuff which don't helped us go into it but like the reality of the oh I guess we weren't super prepared for so now now you're as far as you are a month away from release and I mean I still think it's quite a lot you're gonna learn as you as you get through that but do you think you've what do you think you've picked up that it would help you in your next project what's the core lessons you think you've picked up from doing you know from jumping in so deep you know and what we would do next Friday so of game like game aspect of it would be a lot more dose of planning and management his other charge all of the management stuff for this one and I really no know what I was doing so for the next one it would be before we go into it making sure know what is we

actually want to create make sure we set milestones everything and actually so operate it like a professional business and we saw started doing that along the line but we didn't start off like that and it really so affected the project setting next we'd work on we'd work right away in that mindset and that's probably pretty important for the product itself I mean did you know how much how central the Train question is to why you were getting through the Kickstarter where you were able to achieve that when I asked this as obviously as you guys know I effects money so which interesting now do you think that's an important part of why this was possible I'm using two really good just spreading the word constantly and obviously they're all trans as well they know trans people so it kind of spread out from our musicians mainly mmm your initials we put our musicians for the game got massive traction and then that's what we saw made some connections

I guess with people from that original tweet that sort of helped us get a bit more noticed I guess why not you know there know how much the in the room the context is understood in the last couple of years there's been a like a five-fold increase in young kids who have come out of strands and it's had a massive impact in terms of actually support the waiting list so I think I last heard four years my I went to go into that as probably the wrong thing to do with this talk but the the thing is itself a lot of young people who are discovering who their identity is and if I may this is an incredibly important thing to be able to use the skillsets we're learning to make games to be able to communicate issues that really matter so that's why I'm really keen grateful for you guys that coming up and talking about it [Applause]

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