Monthly Archives: May 2009

Hover, Halflife, Tron and Mirror’s Edge all together!

Today we interview Michael Lubker. Michael started in the IGDA and volunteering with conferences. His first job was actually at a cybercafe and then went to QA The Sims and Supreme Commander. Now he helps with business development for a 3D Wii-like controller for the PC at Axelo, and works on his original indie projects. One of these is a vehicle combat game inspired by Hover and Michael is looking for designers and a publisher for it.

Tell us everything about the game.

Michael Lubker: It’s a vehicle combat game… inspired by Hover! Bumper cars… with a bit of Halflife 2 gravity and Tron and Mirror’s Edge graphic style: we have also some cyberpunk style thematics in gameplay.

Sounds cool! When did you have this game idea?

Michael Lubker: In December 2008, our goal is to release a multiplatform compatible game and a 3D game on Facebook which is relatively rare and eventually be iPhone compatible and maybe other downloadable platforms and go for a free release with more themed maps and content sold afterwards. If we are successful in our web/iPhone release we will try to go for WiiWare, Android, XBLA, and PSN.

It is a multiplayer game, right?

Michael Lubker: It will be all multiplayer (so you could jump on Facebook and ask a friend if they want to play a round of what is basically bumper cars online) with various collection modes etc… crazy powerups and unique areas (cyberpunk versions of aztec ruins, a crashed UFO, etc).

When do you plan to release it?

Michael Lubker: I hope at this point to maybe have an early closed beta by October.

Tell us something about the actual industry, how do you see it in our Crisis times?

Michael Lubker: hmm. seems that the iPhone is burgeoning, and the Wii/DS and Facebook and other social games. So that’s our market, and Unity kinda makes that easy because it supports all those. Also find the Zune HD announcement interesting, MS competing with the iPhone.

More on the Crisis, it seems like there’s a lot of focus on same old stuff, space marines, and it seems like the music genre is becoming rather old hat.

So… the future is mobile?

Michael Lubker: Seems like it could be, I also think OnLive is interesting but with the economy and threats like bandwidth caps it could be hard to get going. I think that something like the iPod could be used as a portable gaming/computer memory device, if it had HDMI output it would be perfect for sharing photos etc and also playing games (since it has wifi your phone basically becomes the controller if it can hook to a HDTV and connect to other iphones as more controllers).