I’d like to tell you a story about a friend of mine named David. He’s an indie game developer in Toronto, Canada. He’s been making cool, free online games (mostly in Flash) now for around a couple years, while working in a government call centre to pay the bills. I relate to his situation quite closely, as I was in the same position myself a few years ago, answering phones in a different government office.

I know, he’s a crazy lookin dude.

For those of you not familiar with the Ludum Dare, in a nutshell it’s a recurring challenge to game developers with varying themes, lengths, goals, etc. One of the Ludum Dares was a challenge to make your first $1 selling a game, and the time range was over the course of October 2012. David took on the challenge and decided to make a game that simulated one of the repeated un-winnable conversations he often had at work. He called it “I Get This Call Every Day,” and decided to sell it from his personal website.
It ended up taking him until December 21st, but he released it as a pay-what-you-want (minimum $2), downloadable game. Last I had heard (around January 25th 2013), he had sold around 300 copies, very impressive considering the game is not a “fun” experience, nor was it intended to be.
Here is where today’s story really begins, though. David was contacted by a reporter at the Toronto Star, and he completed a phone interview with her.
He found out through the Star the next day that he was under investigation from the National Minister of Revenue and the Commissioner of Revenue Canada.
Somehow, without naming or slighting his employer in any way (the game only contains an interface with one difficult caller), the article named him, the office he works at, and pushed concerns of confidential taxpayer information being released and statements of being highly offensive (and if they mean the swearing, trust me – that’s really how many people talk when they call in). I’m no journalist, but I can plainly see some terrible spin there.
David got fired today. And now the fallout.
This has sparked a flood of support in the indie games community and internet commenters (good and bad) are out in full swing. At the time of writing this, the comments section of Toronto Star article have been closed and hidden. From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t pretty.

More:
Ryan Henson Creighton, of Untold Entertainment wrote this blog post, comparing David’s experience to his own and offering a positive conclusion.
The Toronto Game Jam website changed their front page to this article written by Jim McGuinley, calling foul on the part of the Toronto Star reporter and making a good point that he wouldn’t have been fired for any other art form.
David has now been featured on Kotaku for the second time, hopefully this will give his story more reach.
Zoe Quinn posted this article to Pixels or Death.
Here’s the best news I’ve seen: Mike Bithell (who made Thomas Was Alone) wrote this post, announcing that this weekend is going to be CRA jam.
And you can confirm that by seeing it on the Ludum Dare Website, too.

You can support David directly by:
Buying his game from his website,
Voting “YES” to his game on Steam Greenlight (free!),
And if you’re local you can contact your MP, the reporter, and/or the Toronto Star.

UPDATE JAN 30TH, 5:00PM:
There has been a great outpouring of support for David – Thank you all! Here are some more links to what has happened in the past 24 hours:
1. Another article in the Toronto Star, confirming that now he’s been fired (and at least they basically take credit for it).
2. An awesome and supportive article from Post Arcade
3. Metro News picked up the story and posted this article, originally titled “Revenue Canada worker fired for his online rant” (which has since been fixed).
4. The support continues – even to the point of cool “fan-art” like this (I say fan-art, but they’re actually friends who have worked on games together before…)

KNIFE FIGHT!!

I had the pleasure of working once again with Jonathan Levstein, and another 9story artist friend of ours, Pablo Nilo. Much like our previous game AdventureWare, this game was put together in Construct2, exporting for the web in HTML5. Here’s the story behind our Knife Fight Game.

Obviously we didn’t follow the jam theme of “Heartbeats” – but that’s didn’t really matter to us. We felt it was more important to come together and make the cool project  that WE wanted to make, regardless.

The idea started with Jonathan talking about a Juggernaut style match, he shared that idea with us in a coffee shop a couple nights before the jam. We got to talking about how being the Juggernaut is “like bringing a gun to a knife fight” – and it stuck. Pablo said it would be great to make them like 40′s gangsters, and he came up with these great, top-heavy Dick Tracy-looking guys.

You’ll never take him alive, see…

I ran with that old-timey 40′s theme, and recorded all of the instruments analog, even tracking drums with a friend of mine who is a jazz drummer (Paul Hyesung Cho, who has no website to link to unfortunately). I even used the Izotope Vinyl plugin to make the main track output sound as old-timey and crackley as I could manage. My apologies to the people in room C at George Brown during the jam who had to put up with my loud trumpet playing…

So on the downside, doing a multiplayer game, whether in-browser or for desktop – it’s really difficult to manage multiple inputs. Most keyboards don’t register more than 3 or 4 key inputs at the same time. It’s also really hard to crowd 4 people around one keyboard anyway. We decided to go with xbox controllers – but even then you can’t map those keys easily without 3rd party software. WE GOT IT GOIN THOUGH

After seeing the project in a playable state and considering the inconvenience of keymapping, I’ve been thinking we should consider porting Knife Fight to XNA and release on XBLIG, because I feel it would work well there, especially since you are forced to used controllers. If you have any interest in this or comments on the game or porting process, please contact me via email or on twitter.

You can play the game here, and remember you’ll need to use joy2key or Mac GamePad Companion.

Gamercamp is a conference held each year in Toronto, bringing together a wide range of game creators, collaborators and supporters for two days of sessions. The sessions vary from talks, to panels, interactive workshops, free play times, early game demos and test sessions. It’s really great to see interaction between different disciplines – I saw talks by programmers, audio specialists, experimental game designers even the lead writer from Deus Ex:Human Revolution.

It was really great to see everyone who was there. It’s not every day that I get to hang out with people like Nathan Vella (CAPY) and Jonathan Mak (Sound Shapes). The social was a great time, but I completely lost my voice by the end of the night…

You can check out details for yourself, over here. Maybe I’ll see you there next year!