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Edmund Mcmillen: The Binding Of Isaac

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Creating a game with your own two hands is powerful, but it comes with sacrifice. With a self-diligent mind, Edmund McMillen, created a series of successful indie games. Each game was created with the help of a partner, and the games gained popularity and continue to grow in popularity (McMillen, 2011). Edmund conquered having the marketing and advertising pulled from his game, having no resources to test a game for bugs (issues that stop the game from working) before releasing a game, and creating a challenging and rewarding game for mobile phones. Beginning the trek of creating a fun game, Edmund, and game creating partner, Tommy Refenes, decided to do things their own way in the midst of having their advertising and marketing by Microsoft …show more content…

With his partner, Florian Himsl, Edmund created his self-indulgent game from scratch. The team completed their game in the time frame they wanted, but unfortunately did not have the resources to test the game before release to fix any bugs before putting the game on market. The two guys gathered their resources and minds and concluded that to fix any bugs the game would need to be released to the public. With the game released their fans would in turn become the game testers. So the game was released, and within the first day a huge amount of bugs were found (McMillen, 2012). Florian had created the game engine, the software that made the game work, himself, which meant that he and Edmund were able to find and fix bugs rather quickly (McMillen, 2012). After about 4 weeks straight working every day from the time they woke up they rid the game of all of its bugs (McMillen, 2012). I see this problem as something that in most other situations would be dealt with before the release of the game. In most companies there are testers who play the game and find bugs that are then fixed before the release of the game. In this case it was different because there was only two creators, who had no larger company support and no money to pay people to test it. So they looked for …show more content…

Edmund was challenged with creating a game that was, well, challenging for fans. He decided to recreate his classic, Super Meat Boy, for mobile phones, which is an intensely challenging game. He found this solution by recreating a game that was challenging enough, but that also properly rewarded the players, unlike the majority of mobile games (Rose, 2012). As a gamer and a student of the gaming industry I feel blessed to have learned this lesson before working on my own games. I now know that you need to research what games exist in the area you are creating in, not only so another game isn’t copied, but to ensure that the game being created does justice to the people playing the games. I discovered through Edmund’s success that I don’t have to create a game that only exists to make money infinitely, but a onetime cost of a worthy game is just

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