Game Designer and Producer
Unfortunately, last month, I was laid off from my job at Skydance Interactive, where I was working on their upcoming Walking Dead VR game. As a result, I am now open for freelance and commissioned work again! I have updated my prices and available services. Check them out. If you are interested, please drop me a line at thatkevinwong@icloud.com
For the last year, I’ve been quietly producing melessthanthree’s incredible action-adventure game, Lucah: Born of a Dream. Lucah released today on PC and MacOS on the Itch.io and Steam platforms, and its easily one of the best games I have ever worked on.
Shortly after Chambara released in July 2016, I was winded and took a few weeks to visit friends and come out of the isolation of the late project. I visited my friend Colin, who was an advisor on Chambara, to test out a new prototype that he made for a melee combat-centric action game. I gave him feedback and testing data and left to go on my way.
After Chambara’s intentional placidity and pacifism, I wanted my next project to be one that embraced and explored violence more directly. The social conflagrations of that year’s election cycle imbued me with complex feelings about rage, conflict, and confrontation that I avoided confronting about during Chambara’s development. That’s why I secretly wanted to work on Lucah and sought to help Colin out any way I could.
I temporarily moved back to San Francisco in the Spring of 2017. In April, I visited Los Angeles to interview to work on a VR project. While I was there, I met Colin in a Little Tokyo coffee shop where I learned he was planning on launching a Kickstarter to make Lucah his full-time job. Having some experience running crowdfunding campaigns, I offered to help him out.
The Lucah Kickstarter launched on June 9th, 2017. Using the skills I picked up from Chambara‘s launch, I developed press releases, handled communications, and conducted competitive positioning research. The campaign was an intense emotional rollercoaster, and as people would pledge, back out, and return again whenever we got coverage, we felt our hopes and faith in the project rapidly fluctuate. Ultimately, we succeeded and raised $22,017 to fund a year of development on Lucah.
In January 2018, I returned to the team as a producer to keep the game on track to release on time, on a budget, and to the standard of quality we wanted. This was a thrilling project to work on, and I’m incredibly proud of what we have accomplished.
Lucah: Born of a Dream is $20 on Itch.io and Steam. Purchase it now and support courageous, personal, and breathtaking experimental work.
Ha! It is finally here!
Chambara is now available on PC and Mac in all territories! Were you not able to get the game on your console or in your region, now’s your chance to get it at a great new price! This version is a little better optimized than the earlier one, so I recommend buying it and bringing it to the next party y’all go to!
Buy it on Itch.io and get the artbook and original prototype! I put a lot of work collecting a big archive of art and media from production, a lot of which has never been seen before!
This concludes the Chambara project.
The first seeds of Chambara were planted in 2013 when Genddy T, creator of Samurai Jack, visited USC to give a talk about the series. I was 18 then. I’m 23 now. The story of Chambara‘s development, told in the art book, is largely the story of how my friends and I grew together and kicked off our careers in games. Please pick it up and give it a gander, as it means a lot to us.
#RemakeJam is a game jam where you remake your very first game!
#RemakeJam invites participants to contextualize themselves and their current state as game-makers by recognizing their past work and how they’ve grown. Jammers shall use the duration of the game jam to remake the very first game they created, adapting them to use any new skills, aesthetics, or techniques they developed since they started. In doing so, we hope that jammers can be inspired by how they’ve grown and evolved as creatives.
Right now, there are few rules and guidelines for #RemakeJam
I originally delivered this address to the North Hollywood Global Game Jam site on January 20th, 2017, coincidentally, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States. I forgot to publish it, but here were my thoughts at the time.
Hello, and welcome to the North Hollywood Global Game Jam.
You are amongst a cohort of hundreds of thousands across the world, who, over the course if this weekend, will bring a record number of digital, analog, and physical games to life. You should be proud of that. Games are ancient, and play’s influence spreads across history through our primal roots. In making games today, you’re practicing a potent, ancient magic with the power to touch and change hearts, and I think it’s pretty exciting to get the chance be part of something so vast.
This is my sixth Global Game Jam, and to me, the Global Game Jam has always stood out as a celebration of creativity, community, and collaboration, the very best aspects of the game-making community. I look forward to celebrating those values with you this weekend.
It goes without saying that there are things out there that should not be celebrated, injustices like xenophobia, discrimination, intolerance, territorialism. Unfortunately, that’s our world today, and we can’t deny what’s clear and present in front of us. We all have our brief time to affect the world around us, and it is baffling that there are folks who are using those precious moments to celebrate the toxic values Donald Trump and his base embodies.
But we, here, won’t be part of that. We have nothing to contribute to a stark mountain of cruelty and pain. We can practice that potent, ancient magic of playcrafting for good, and take responsibility as creators. Even if we are privileged by the security to not be marching the streets tonight, we can still take action with our practice. We can make games that uplift, empower, and inspire. We can shine a light and give those around us something genuine to celebrate.
What will you give to the world this weekend?
I made a little thing for ResistJam called Words of Resistance! It is a typing game where you transcribe progressive texts to fight off waves of enemies. Check it out.
Happy Holidays folks, incredible card by the equally incredible Chambara Art Director, Catherine Fox. Here’s to a better 2017. We got work to do.
