Introducing Bust Out Games and Brahmageddon

Jamie’s girlfriend was having a tough time struggling with putting on (or was it taking off?) a sports bra. Jokingly, Jamie asked her if she was experiencing bra-mageddon. Later that week in the office, somehow that silly term he coined morphed into “Brahma-geddon.”

Uh, wouldn’t that be a cool name for a video game? Brahmageddon. Uh, heh heh. That’s funny.

Next thing I knew, Jamie delivered an entire game specification document, and so was the start of Bust Out Games and our first steps into the iOS gaming industry.

Months before the start of Bust Out Games, I had a number of conversations with Robert Weber of W3i on game distribution, monetization, game play design, and the game industry in general. It was quite an eye opener for me, and a motivator for our team to get into something as fun and challenging as game development.

We knew enough about the gaming industry to understand how competitive it is, so monetary success wasn’t immediately our primary motivator. Our intent was not to build the next Angry Birds or become millionaires off of seven-year-olds making in-app purchases on their dads’ iPhones. The point of building Brahmageddon was to set a baseline for what the Bust Out team could produce in the gaming industry. We tracked our time and managed the project as if it were normal client work. We spent close to 400 hours developing the concept, designing, illustrating, composing music, engineering, and testing. Much of that time was spent learning both the technology and game design ropes since we had never done this before, so naturally we anticipate our next game to take much less time. We used Basecamp for messaging and project management, tracked tickets in Pivotal Tracker, and logged hours in Harvest just as we do for client work.

Brahmageddon

Featuring characters from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the great classical epics of India, Brahmageddon is a light-hearted and absorbing way to escape the stresses of modern life, and return to a time when heros were real heros, and the bad guys were real demons.

It’s mayhem in ancient India! Cannibal demons are popping up everywhere! Brahmageddon is nigh! Yet all hope is not lost, for your fingertips possess the awesome power of … demon smiting! Will you wield that power? Will you heed the hero’s call? Well, look at their smug little faces. Don’t you just want to bonk them on the head?

Brahmageddon is basically whack-a-mole with Hindu demons instead of moles. The concept of the game is Jamie’s brain child. By day, Jamie is our quality assurance tester. By night, Jamie is a game designer with a knack for coming up with kitschy concepts that combine humor and fun with strategy and problem solving. Originally, the game concept was to whack Hindu gods, but then we decided that would be offensive to Hindus. Then we thought, what if instead of picking on Hinduism we included all religions? Jesus would pop up – *whack* – then Buddha – *whack* – Muhammad – *whack*! But… perhaps offending all of the world’s major religions was worse than picking on one, so we landed on the concept of demons. Demons are bad! Who wouldn’t want to whack a demon?

With a game concept as simple as this, the character art is crucial to the user’s experience. The game play is clearly important as well, but without good character art the game lacks interest. During development we used placeholder images for the characters while Dan finalized the illustrations. Once Paul dropped the finalized images into the game, it was a whole new experience.

Game concept and testing was done by Jamie Huggett, engineering was done by Paul Cantrell, graphics were done by Andrew Bessler, character illustration by Dan Anderson, Jamie’s younger brother composed the soundtrack, and we recorded local musician Marcus Wise playing the tabla.

As a test project, it’s really a fine piece of software and a damn fun game. Kids love it. Adults love it. Go buy it!