Video game developed in Palmer gets official launch

PALMER — It’s probably fair to say that at nearly every step, the process of building an adventure puzzle game in his spare time has exceeded David Board’s expectations.

Lifeless Planet, which tells the story of an astronaut sent to explore a planet multiple light years from Earth and the abandoned Soviet town he finds in the middle of a Mars-like desert, launched Friday on the extremely popular online gaming platform Steam.

“It’s been almost three years of working nights and weekends,” Board said. “Lots and lots and lots of late nights. It’s kind of a relief to be finally at release day.”

Board is a Palmer resident and partner in a very small media production firm, Stage 2 Studios, that produces video, television and web content mostly for nonprofits.

“It’s a small partnership and I handle all of the website and app development,” he said.

He said the idea for Lifeless Planet, the game he built, had a lot of appeal to him. First, he said, it would be a fun project. Second, he said, it would hopefully make money. And third, it would be a good calling card for future production work.

“Sometimes it’s hard to sell clients on a full feature app,” he said.

So he set to work, and, “it kind of exploded from there.”

He took the idea to Kickstarter, a website aimed at connecting people with ideas to people with money to fund them. There, he raised $17,000 — twice what he was looking for. He signed a worldwide distribution agreement with a London publisher — Lace Mama Global.

In August 2012, the game went to PAX Prime, a massive convention for gaming in Seattle. It was featured at the Kickstarter booth where it got mostly positive reviews.

Now, with the game available on Steam and on his own website — lifelessplanet.com — Board is gearing up for maybe an even more important convention. From June 10 to June 13 he’ll be at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

“E3 is always the one that gets talked up the most because it’s sort of the industry event and it’s only for press and industry people,” he said.

It’s also where big names in the industry, console manufacturers and game developers, make big announcements.

Though the official Steam launch was Friday, Board said that the game has been available in a beta version for three months there. People who downloaded the beta version were basically testers — letting Board know where there were bugs to fix. For their help, now they will receive a copy of the full version of the game.

“They gave me feedback, and since I’m a one man show here I needed that,” Board said.

Board said the game grew out of his longtime fascination with old Cold War science fiction; stuff he read growing up and televisions shows like the Twilight Zone.

Though most of the work is attributable to Board, he said he had some help along the way including a professional composer he hired to write the game’s score and a professional writer who penned a lot of the materials the main character uses to figure out what happened on the planet.

Board clearly seems amazed that his creation has metastasized the way it did.

“It just kind of kept becoming a bigger and bigger thing and now here we are going to E3, which is just ridiculous,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.