Hoosier Games is a club for students interested in video game development. Its members focus on the different aspects of the industry, from programming and coding to music and aesthetic design.
“Hoosier Games is a bunch of people who get together and build indie games from the ground up,” Max Lancaster, the executive producer of Hoosier Games, said.
It is one thing to enjoy slaying the occasional dragon in “Skyrim,” but it is an entirely different thing to want to make “Skyrim.” Taking the step from loving video games to creating them is a decision which can seem daunting at first.
However, many people join the club not knowing anything about how to make games.
“That’s where I was when I first joined a year and a half ago,” Lancaster said. “We try to perpetuate a culture of the veteran members teaching the new members.”
Lancaster, who studies marketing in the Kelley School of Business, said participating in Indy PopCon was an important moment for building the Hoosier Games brand.
“We really want to create an identity for Hoosier Games that is recognized outside of just IU-Bloomington so that we can build networks with other game companies,” he said.
Lancaster said he hopes to make Hoosier Games a powerful connection in the video game industry for aspiring game developers in the Midwest, a region not typically known for video games.
Conventions such as Indy PopCon and the Combine, Bloomington’s own tech convention, are vital to this aspiration.
Indy PopCon also gave Hoosier Games a chance to see how the public responded to playing their work. Receiving mass feedback and observations from hundreds of different people puts an entirely new light on a game which had previously only been play-tested by a handful of developers.
“When you make a game, you know all of the bugs that exist, and you purposefully avoid them,” Lancaster said. “When someone plays it for the first time, they can show you things that you might have missed before.”
Although Hoosier Games’ ?approximately 40 members are currently developing several games, they were only able to show the three at the convention that they believed the most suitable for mass ?demonstrations.
Angela Lograsso is Hoosier Games’ co-executive producer and the creator of “Hellpaws,” one of the three projects that Hoosier Games selected for the convention.
“‘Hellpaws’ is about a cat flying through hell, shooting flaming hairballs and trying to get his nine lives back,” Lograsso said. “People see it, and they want to play it. It’s a hilarious game, and it has a certain sex appeal.”
To demonstrate the diversity of the Hoosier Games’ development teams, they also presented “Tap Tap Pop,” a mobile game about keeping balls in the air, and “TextQuest,” a first-person, 3D, text-based adventure game currently on ?Steam Greenlight.
Greenlight is a PC game distribution platform which allows players to vote for indie games they would like the company Steam to ?publish.
“We need votes to become a Steam publisher,” Lancaster said. “Hoosier Games is all about growth this year, so being published on Steam would be ?incredibly helpful.”
