Independents Days: An Interview With Josh Hughes Cofounder of Indie Game Studio “Team Kaizen” PT.2

Photo courtesy of hastac.org Beta: How do you think STEM could be naturally integrated into a game without it feeling too educational, though? Josh: Well, we already have a proof of concept with that in “Burst”, the game we’re doing a Kickstarter on right now and we’re trying to raise awareness for. Beta: Tell me about that game. Josh: It’s a rhythm game where you detonate fireworks to the beat of indie musicians, and we have two major goals with Burst. One is of course the support of indie musicians. We already feature “M-79″ which is a local band out of Montana. If people go to http://teamkaizengames.com/m-79/ they can download the song that they did for our game, for free. They were awesome about it. We built a proof of concept in Flash. We’re getting a lot of decent feedback off of it, and we’re ready to kick it to 11 now, and rebuild Burst in ‘Unreal 3′. With the ‘Unreal 3′ build we are aiming to have a web tool where indie bands can go to a website, upload their music, add the beats that players need to respond to, and then make their own DLC for it. We really want to support indie bands with that and want to make a game that they can lift up as the indie rhythm game for indie musicians. The game that they could use to hopefully network with their fan bases more, expand their fan bases and all that. As part of that we are also teaming up with a local performance hall called The 406 Club who’s gonna throw a massive fund raiser on the 23rd of March to help promote “Burst”, and the meeting of indie musicians and indie video game designers. Beta: That sounds really cool. That’s the thing that I appreciate about “Burst”, because a lot of indie musicians or artists, they don’t get a chance to go to these big companies and pitch their music or present their music to try to license it out, because they don’t have the connections. For them to have a place where they can say, my song is in this game, and be proud, and hold it up, and put it out to people. That will benefit you, it’ll benefit them and I think more games should be more in tuned with what other indie artists are doing outside of gaming, because there’s just so many different ways to promote what each other are doing. Josh: Absolutely, cause we found out about a lot of indie bands because we went to The 406 Club, and our friends from LA “Gemini Syndrome” they are an up and coming band they actually just signed with Warner Brothers. We’ve been friends with their guitarist ‘Juzwick’ for a while . When we heard that they were performing in our city we we’re like “sweet we’ll go see Juzwick perform”. We go there and see all these other indie bands from our region and we realized these guys...