vested interest

Factsheet

Developer:
vested interest
Based in Gainesville, FL and Boston, MA

Founding date:
mid-2010

Website:
vested-interest.co

Press / Business contact:
fabr.IQ@vested-interest.co

Social:
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram

Releases:
OVNI
Simian Interface

Address:
1425 NE 7th Ter
Gainesville, FL
32601

Phone:
(352) 256-8602

Description

vested interest is an indie game studio in Gainesville, Florida. The team is comprised of designer/artist/programmer Jonathan Yuhas and designer/writer Josh Leeper.

History

Origin story

Late in 2007, game designer Jon Yuhas and writer Josh Leeper were assigned to the same windowless office at the Florida branch of Ignition Entertainment. While working on the core design of a first person shooter, they were inspired equally by retro games and the burgeoning world of indie games. After Ignition was abruptly shuttered, they prototyped an asymmetric co-op shooter/RTS called _monkeyrobot with a small team of former Ignition employees. Ambitiously, a mobile tie-in was loosely designed, but _monkeyrobot was shelved as most of the team found jobs.

OVNI

Still unemployed but committed to smaller-scale game development, Jon and Josh built some quick and dirty Flash prototypes using Adam Saltsman's Flixel library. The most promising was OVNI, which featured a cloaking, hovering UFO piloted by an alien hired to harvest meat from livestock (and eventually other lifeforms). Hosted on Kongregate and Newgrounds, OVNI had a positive reception, which encouraged them to keep going with small, simple games.

Deciding that _monkeyrobot would be too difficult to revive with just two people, they dusted off the design for the _monkeyrobot mobile tie-in, a 'Simian Computer Interface Trainer', and started to experiment. The first playable Flash demo required the player to move colored squares into a specific arrangement indicated by a picture-in-picture window before a timer ran out. This demo was the foundation of what became simian.interface. Playtesting with friends and relatives helped them tune the difficulty curve and encouraged them to strip the game down to its simplest elements. After a long phase of polishing, simian.interface was released on Flash game portals and received very positive reviews.

simian.interface++

Former Ignition producer Scot Kramarich saw the potential of simian.interface and pitched it to Chillingo. The game was ported to Unity and was released for iOS. Reviewers and players agreed that the game was fun and beautiful but not quite long enough, so Jon and Josh began experimenting with procedural puzzle generation. A new mode called infinite_loop mode was developed which featured endless procedural level generation, randomizable story screens, dynamic music remixing, and variable backgrounds. After more than a year of polishing and the addition of a timed_evaluation challenge mode, the new modes were added to simian.interface and the title was changed to simian.interface++. The iOS version of the game received the new content for free, and simian.interface++ is now available for PC/MC on Steam and the Humble Store.

Projects

• OVNI
• Simian Interface

Team & Repeating Collaborator

Jon Yuhas
Design, programming, art

Josh Leeper
Design, art, sound fx

NOTE!
Music

Contact

Inquiries
fabr.IQ@vested-interest.co

Twitter
twitter.com/vestedgames

Facebook
facebook.com/vestedgames

Web
vested-interest.co