What’s it about?
Generic Jack is a 3D running game developed for iOS where the player has to manoeuvre the central character Jack through a dangerous and challenging obstacle course. The player uses buttons on screen to jump over and slide under any incoming and potentially dangerous obstacles. Each level has its own silly theme and setting, allowing the player experience to differ from level to level with new obstacles and environments to get used to. The name ‘Generic Jack’ is pretty ironic, as the situations he gets into are far from generic. The game also takes influence from the highly addictive and stylized platform game The Impossible Game, where the player is vulnerable to anything that slows momentum and is then set back to the latest checkpoint.
Story
Meet Jack, unlike most office workers he’s not just another mindless drone working for the man. Jack spends his days getting into crazy and outlandish situations. Simply being late for work can be a struggle for his life sometimes!
Level 1
The first level actually does follow Jack on his adventure to work, the trouble is he has overslept and only has 2 minutes to get to his job at Average Agency Ltd, his nerves and his parkour skills are tested with infuriating consequences. Oh and did I mention the train? Nevermind…
Level 2
Level 2 finds Jack on holiday, this holiday being a great exploration into the jungle. Quickly jack finds himself in a bit of bother when he is foiled by a booby trap leaving him deep underground and facing his hardest challenge yet, darkness and booby traps!
Level 3
SPACE LEVEL!! Jack is pursuing another career; his office job just isn’t exciting enough for him so he decides to work on a high tech space station. Incoming asteroids threatens his life and he has to make it to the escape pod without mistake. Oh, and it just so happens that he is at the wrong end of the space station….
Lazy Games – About Us
We are a small independent developer formed from a group of university graduates with the desire to showcase our talent in the games industry through developing high quality titles on multiple platforms. With game development becoming increasingly accessible it feels like the perfect time to be an indie developer. Our team is currently Ben Halpin (lead), Sean Goddard Mohammed Zaib, Dean Reynolds, and David Cameron.
It started off with just 3 of us; me (Ben), Sean and Mohammed wanting to get a game out there to act as a primary portfolio piece. We were all doing the same course at the University of Bolton and we knew we would need something to prove our worth to potential employers in the games industry. It was towards the end of our course when we decided to start developing an iOS game using the Unreal Development Kit which we had previous experience with. Originally we planned the project to take 8 month max, and that was with ~2 months for testing. What we didn’t factor in was just how much time our group would dedicate to the project. There were 5 of us to start, 2 dropped off early on, so 3 of us left which was the case until recently when we recruited Dean and David. This combined with everyone in the group having full/part time jobs is why the project has taken just over a year now (at time of writing).
Why the name ‘Lazy Games’?
During our time at university we had our lazy moments, there were actually quite a few of them… Towards the end of our course when we were planning Generic Jack, we were playing around with what we were going to call ourselves. Mohammed suggested Lazy Games (as a joke I think) and it pretty much stuck. It suits us perfectly as we are all pretty laid back and we never let ourselves get too stressed about work. That’s not to say we shy away from hard work, game development isn’t exactly easy but we have a fairly laissez-faire approach to what we do and it suits us well.
Why Generic Jack?
We were big fans of ‘The Impossible Game’ so we thought it would be a nice ‘starter’ game for us to create something with the same mechanics in a 3D environment with UDK. We were in love with the concept of a simple easy to play game that’s hard to master. The iOS platform felt perfect for our game concept as it has incredibly easy touch controls and we could achieve decent looking graphics with the power of UDK’s iOS capabilities.
Why is it free?
At first we intended for the game to have micro-transactions so you would get the first level free and the other levels would cost a small fee. This was until we discovered that we were not allowed to make any money with the modelling software licences we currently have. We have built all of our models using the student version of 3DS Max which cannot be used commercially. We can buy a commercial license but we would have to remake all of our models from scratch due to how Autodesk’s licensing works. It sucks not being able to make any money on this but it’s actually not all bad.
Looking ahead I think we can use Generic Jack to gain enough interest in Lazy Games to get the proper funding for our next game to we can game develop full time. This has always been our goal but I personally think it can not only get us a full time job at an established studio but a full time job at our own studio given things takes off. Yes it’s an ambitious thought, but in a world where a simple game like Flappy Bird can make $50K per day, I think it’s certainly worth a shot!
Some extra details are available on:
Our facebook page: www.facebook.com/Properlazygames
Our Twitter: www.twitter.com/ProperLazyGames
Our Website: www.lazygames.org