‘Small, weird games’ for everybody
Times & Galaxy is Copychaser’s first time working with a publisher: Australia’s Fellow Traveller Games, which helped fund the project.
“We as the developers create the game, and it’s the publisher’s job to sell the game, to get it as far and as wide as possible,” he said. “The publisher’s job is to cut through the noise and bring the game to market in a significant way.”
Unlike movie trailers, which are usually cut from a film nearly ready to be released, game trailers feature demos that are essentially the minimum viable product the developers have ready to play. Gelinas and his team remain hard at work to meet the deadlines for a 2024 release.
“Right now, we’re putting meat on the bones,” he said. The remaining work includes character art, level art, audio, and more. “The demo has two cycles, two shifts at the newspaper, and we’re planning on 17.”
Gelinas is looking for distribution platforms (as in, consoles) for Times & Galaxy outside PC-based platforms like Steam, which he says indie games “live and die by.” He said he’s hoping this could be Copychaser’s breakthrough moment, even if he’s not aiming to be the next mega-developer in the market.
“I don’t want to turn this studio into a 300-person studio. That’s not our goal,” he said. “I want to create a small team that can confidently and with stability create small, weird games for the audiences that are out there, and for new audiences. There’s a video game for literally everybody. They just haven’t found it or played it yet. And that goes for everybody — I’m talking, your grandmother.”
