ITWire

Trent Kusters is a busy, dedicated man, despite his collective League of Geeks getting to the business end of their ‘out-of-hours’ project Armello, the bills still need to be paid, and the day job work is also nearing the pointy end of the project plan. “On my day job we went Beta last week, so it has been mayhem” says Kusters.

However, it is Armello that Kusters is here to speak about, and it is obvious that it is with gusto he wishes to orate on, “It’s our passion project, for everyone involved.” Says Kusters “Almost all of us have day jobs, in studios, animation studios, some are working at film, or special effect studios, freelance song composers while others are in game studios like Ty [Carey] and I are at a company called Divisive Media.  We’re making games during the day, and we just wanted to make an awesome game and do the biggest, craziest game we could without having to bet the wife and kids on it. “

“We don’t have, like, we have forty eight bucks in the bank, and I had this crazy idea, so, we don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to shell out so, we are pulling on every resource we can, whether it’s community support or online tools or people working in lieu of actual payment, we’re using every trick in the book to minimise any type of overhead to ensure we can do everything possible to make this game amazing.”

The LOG is aware that cash (or the modern equivalent ) is still required to get a project into the market place in a serious way, Kusters and his crew were able to land some support from Film Victoria:  “Yeah!, yep, we did,” says Kusters “and that is one of the things, any sort of resource we could pull on.  We knew we could do the game without funding, so all the funding is for external to actual development of the game.  So for example the funding from Film Vic we got $30K for marketing, so that covers our marketing hard costs, paying for things like paying for ads or App of the Day, even promotional material for conferences.”

“Then we got funding from Screen Australia to do some trans-media stuff, the wonderful trailer you saw will be paid for by the Screen Australia grant as well as some other trans-media outlets where we can build on the story, the world and the universe of Armello.”

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