Ok, where were we? I put out a call on Twitter asking for someone to help me make a game. My friend Alex got in touch with some people and he also recommended that I join the Philly Game Mechanics Discord. I got some DMs almost immediately directly from some game developers, so I decided to try and work my way through those first. Some of them were from very generic looking accounts. Some didn’t even have profile pictures. I replied to the ones that seemed most promising, and I ended up not having to join the Discord at all, as it quickly became clear that one of the first people I replied to was probably going to be a good fit. 

Scott Robertson of HyperFuel Games reached out to me and basically said all of the words I needed to hear: 

Hey, I make small scale browser games for work and fun. Depending on what you need I may be a good fit. I’ll be on desktop in a moment and I can send you some links to stuff I or myself and collaborators have made.
I primarily work in 2d, have done some 3d, but am less proficient. I have a WebVR experience that I usually don’t share around because with how fast the web moves, it doesn’t work in VR anymore, but if you wanted to see 3d work, I could share it over.

I also can function as just myself, my small team who I make my hobby games with, or if you need to full support of a marketing firm, the company I work for offers that.

Thanks for hearing me out. Let me know if you think my work is a good fit for what you need. 

This was a really good reply, because he reached out to me directly, told me his specific strengths and weaknesses, and positioned himself as someone who could could handle a project of multiple sizes, depending on what we required. Basically, he demonstrated that we’d be in good hands with him. He also included links to working games that he’d made in the past.

I wrote back and said:

Hey Scott, thanks for this! I think you could be the guy I’m looking for. What’s the best email address to reach you at? These DMs are getting pretty long. I’d like to describe what I’m looking for, and then we can see what you think.

As a short description: I run a company that helps other companies to recover failed payments. Think of netflix, when your card can’t be billed for some reason, they email you about it. We do that, but better, and we communicate with our customers’ customers in all sorts of ways (email, sms, in-app, etc)

my company is https://stunning.co

i’d like to make an educational game that teaches people about failed payments, because a lot of companies don’t know that it’s even a problem until it’s too late (payments are already failing).

let me know what you think (and send me your email if you don’t mind) and we can take it from there with more details!

Then he replied, in part:

Trying to work something like this into a game sounds like an interesting challenge. Feel free to reach out to me on my freelance email at [REDACTED].

I emailed him after this with my very poorly illustrated concept for the game. Next post, I’ll show my very embarassing mockups.

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