![]() ![]() “The first couple G.D.C.s were about contract work,” Kaman told me. He returned the next year and found more gigs. His goal was to pick up freelance work and stave off a full-time job. In the spring of 2017, on the cusp of graduation, Kaman travelled to San Francisco to attend the Game Developers Conference, an annual weeklong convention of game designers, game writers, animators, visual-effects artists, software engineers, marketers, quality-assurance testers, sound designers, corporate-account managers, and others in and around the game industry. ![]() ![]() A year or so later, they were startled to see that Smashy Brick had been downloaded several hundred thousand times. “You get a five-hundred-dollar Taco Bell gift card.” They used the card to cater the game’s launch party. (Instead of paddles, players draw trampolines.) Smashy Brick was a winner in the Taco Bell Indie Game Garage competition and Kaman and Brown were flown out to San Diego to promote it at TwitchCon, a convention hosted by Twitch, the live-streaming platform favored by gamers. “Like, how do I do player input? How do I do jump physics? How do I spawn in pipes that move from the right to the left?” He concluded, “If you make Flappy Bird, you can make Mario.” In 2015, Kaman and a classmate, Tyler Brown, released a free-to-play mobile game called Smashy Brick, which was a riff on the classic arcade game Pong. “You can make that game in half an hour, but by doing that you’ve learned all these fundamentals of game-making,” Kaman said. Eventually, he started running the on-campus game-development club, which taught students how to build games along the lines of Flappy Bird using Unity, a game engine. At the University of Washington, he studied human-centered design and engineering-“Pretty cringe,” he said-while teaching himself how to make video games. Nick Kaman, the co-founder and art director of Aggro Crab, an indie-game studio in Seattle, is twenty-six years old, with messy, brass-bleached hair, large round eyeglasses, and a small silver hoop in each earlobe self-deprecating and sincere, with a sarcastic streak, he speaks with slacker chill. ![]()
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