Today we’ve taken the traditional Timeout to the next level and are bringing you an exclusive interview with Shaun Inman, the man behind The Last Rocket, Mimeo and more.
What made you transition into games?
I’ve always loved video games. As a kid, if I wasn’t playing them I was reading about them. If I wasn’t reading about them I was thinking about them. Fast forward to 2009. I had an epiphany. Over the years I had acquired three skills central to game development: design, programming, and music. I also realized that Mint and Fever didn’t appear fully formed out of the ether. They both started as smaller, less ambitious ideas, and grew into the fully featured applications they are today. Once that sunk in, I couldn’t not make games!
So you’re in Chatanooga now. What’s that like—is there a good tech scene?
Chattanooga is a great little city with a strong creative and technology community. I’m probably the least qualified person to talk it though, being the hermit that I am. I can tell you that we have the fastest internet in the US. We moved to Chattanooga in 2007 after I spoke at a web design conference here. We were living in Baltimore at the time and decided that we much prefered the birds to police helicoptors and the bunnies to drug dealers.
Tell us about your Kickstarter project!
Sure! Rusty Moyher, Matt Grimm and I are doing a Kickstarter called Retro Game Crunch. We want to make six games in six months. We were inspired by the Ludum Dare game jams in which participants are given a community-determined theme and a weekend to build a game.
For Retro Game Crunch, backers will be able to submit and then vote on themes. We’ll make a game based on the winning theme in three days. Everyone gets to play it. Then we polish the game for thirty days and backers get the finished game. At the end of the month we start the whole process over again.
Here are some screenshots from Super Clew Land, the game that started it all:
What role did Dribbble play in the project?
I’m no stranger to game jams. Every time I do one I post work-in-progress shots on Dribbble. The Dribbble community and their reaction to my early videogame shots were actually a huge motivating factor in my decision to pursue game design full-time.
So the question on everyone’s mind is: what’s going on with Mimeo?
Poor Mimeo, he’s still trapped somewhere in the Kleptopus Kingdom! Mimeo and the Kleptopus King was an ambitious project. Especially for a first game. At the time I didn’t know what I didn’t know about game design. My inexperience was compounded by the sheer volume of required assets and the gameplay complexity the resolution switching mechanic introduced. I still love the idea and hope to return to it after I have a few more games under my belt. And maybe a bigger team!
Be sure to check out Retro Game Crunch on kickstarter and support a fellow Dribbbler!
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