Kiwi Game Starter and the Creative Business Cup 2018

Building on the feedback from Christchurch Armageddon 2018, the Cloudfire team has been hard at work on Starport Delta and putting together submissions for competitions to showcase our team and our game.

First up is the NZGDA‘s Kiwi Game Starter competition! The competition is a programme for New Zealand start-up companies or people wanting to start up a company around an interactive game product they’re building that hasn’t been released yet. We’ve been big fans of the programme since it was launched, watching over the last few years and playing some of the finalists at NZGDC. Last year we submitted Rampage Arena, but unfortunately didn’t make the finalists. Despite that, we got some good feedback from participating and the competition deadline provided a good milestone for us to work towards. This year’s application had a much stronger focus on the business side, with templates for a Business and Marketing plan, as well as a Supporting Data spreadsheet. We hope to make it to the finals this time, and get more feedback on our game and our business.

Up next is the Creative Business Cup New Zealand. Launched during Techweek NZ 2018 in May, the CBCNZ is a national event focused on supporting creative industries start-ups. Businesses and entrepreneurs gather to share and showcase their work, as well as providing an opportunity to network with potential investors, mentors and other supportive people. The winner of the New Zealand competition also heads to Copenhagen in November during Global Entrepreneurship Week for the world Creative Business Cup competition. This is the first year that New Zealand is participating, and we’re proud to be one of the companies to apply in our inaugural year – being a finalist would be a great chance for us to help raise the profile of the game development community in New Zealand.

Last but not least is the NZGDA‘s Indie Biz Showcase. This is a new event this year at NZGDC which aims to provide a space for game creators to connect with other business, platform and service providers. We didn’t participate in NZGDC 2017’s Bean Bag-End Indie Showcase which was held at the same time as the conference presentations, so we’re looking forward to showing Starport Delta and having a chance to connect with other developers and people interested in the games industry away from the hustle and bustle of the conference.

Since Christchurch Armageddon, we’ve been working in adding a new in-game UI that we’ll be showing off soon, and some new features that were popular requests at the convention. This includes a way to manually deconstruct tiles, and the much-requested ability to rotate the camera around the station. To see the latest updates be sure to follow Starport Delta on Facebook and Cloudfire on Twitter, and check in on our Starport Delta page here at Cloudfire Studios!