Angry winged rats and audiosurfing have occupied the indie gaming scene for far too long, but students and faculty here at UB have seen the future: robotic manservants.
Take into account this backstory from a new online flash game called Robot Butler: in the grim darkness that is the future of human existence, humanity has become frail-minded and weak due to its mechanical minions. The machine overlords have decided it's high time to revolt against the humans and take over what's theirs.
As one robot who hasn't forgotten the importance of serving, the player will sacrifice it all to protect the home of his fleshy masters.
The premise of this indie title will shatter the boundaries of philosophical ideas in gaming, all while doing it with a beautiful background done by the team of RUST Ltd. RUST is a small arts collective composed of graduates, undergraduates, and a former adjunct professor of the media studies department right here at UB.
This academically coherent group of individuals has banded together to develop a game that has a shot of winning Kongregate.com's Unity3D Contest. The contest pits teams of developers against one another using the Unity3D engine, one that the team from Buffalo has a lot of experience with.
"With the Unity build of Robot Butler, the graphics are much richer. [The graphics] will be comparable to that of a AAA game title, far more than that of a standard flash game," said Adam Liszkiewicz, a recent graduate of the media studies department.
RUST has developed a game that is really in the crossroads of popular indie games. By combining two successful genres, the team has created an entirely new way to look at a tired concept.
"Robot Butler is definitely a unique game, somewhere in between a tower defense game and GameLab's Diner Dash," Liszkiewicz said.
The team's limited budget and strenuous time constraints haven't stopped it from meeting its own expectations. The team members, while mostly in the Buffalo area, are scattered throughout the U.S., and therefore a higher level of coordination is required to keep moving the game forward.
Anton Hand, the game's lead designer, balances the figurative spinning plate of the game development cycle while still teaching classes in the virtual classrooms of Second Life. Previously, Hand taught both graduate students and undergrads in the DMS department until leaving to pursue other interests in game design.
Hand has since then founded RUST Ltd. with Liszkiewicz and former classmate Luke Noonan. This collaborative effort between the UB grads has led to titles such as Asterisk and m!ndsweeper, a creative spin on the classic Windows staple.
Robot Butler represents the group's most ambitious project yet, and if successful, it will net the team a $10,000 cash prize. Before the game could go live, the team had to pull out all the nuts and bolts to make Robot Butler as polished as possible. The whole game was completed in less than two months, a task that only a group of indie game developers is capable of accomplishing.
"You don't have a $15 million budget," Hand said. "You have to utilize your resources better than most other companies." When asked about what the winnings would go toward, Hand jokingly responded that the company could use a ball pit.
"But seriously, $10,000 would definitely help cement us as a company and we could purchase the software we need to continue to put out these artistic titles," Hand said.
To vote for Robot Butler or check out other entries in Kongregate's Unity3D contest, visit the website at www.kongregate.com/unity_game_contest.
*Full disclosure: RUST Ltd. intern John Connelly was a former asst. editor for The Spectrum.
E-mail: arts@ubspectrum.com
