Page 2 of 6 Dissecta 22 Nov 05: Heroes of the Pacific
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From a programming point of view the demo of the game was achieveable: "we had a very small team with limited resources and we weren't going to have to build complex animation systems or do lots of character animation work... and we could set it over water which was a big cop out and which meant that as we didn't have an artist we could get away with doing very little landscaping and terrain."
In the push to make the demo, money was raised from family and friends, about $50,000 in all, and a couple of PS2 development kits were acquired via the Game Developers Association of Australia and Victorian Government PS2 Dev Kit program.
Ben formed a small team for the demo, with 5 coders including himself and one part time artist, and in four months the demo was created and "I actually did achieve most of my goals" for the demo said Ben.
Pitching to Publishers
"The next big challenge was basically going out and selling the demo" Ben commented, "and I actually invested a bit of money is producing beautiful pitch documents, got a professional to do it who had previous experience as an acquisitions guy in a publisher."
Ben also did a lot of homework on publishers and who they would pitch it to.
He then did a tour of the US, avoiding the trade shows and opting for meetings with the individual publishers.
