‘There’s no reason you can’t make video games here’

In the small basement of the Lyman & Sheets Insurance Agency building is a team of people who spend their days developing futuristic cities, designing half-human spiders and creating a fictional war.

They’re workers at a fledgling video game design firm called Strength in Numbers Game Studios. The cities and humanoid spiders are part of the company’s first effort, dubbed Project: Tuebor, a story-driven role-playing game set in the year 7235.

“There’s no reason you can’t make video games here,” said Scott Reschke, the company’s founder. “You just need the right people.”

Reschke is the former owner of The Frag Center, a cyber-cafe and computer repair store in East Lansing. He gathered data during his time there, statistics from 500,000 hours of aggregated game-time from players of all ages, genders and nationalities. He says he was able to determine what appealed to gamers, as well as what drove them away from certain titles.

“The original intent was to make sure that the games we had installed at the cyber cafe were the games (customers) wanted to play,” said Reschke. “What I came to realize over several years of doing it was we had this blueprint for a product … What would happen if we modeled a product after only reasons they kept playing?”

When he closed The Frag Center in 2010, Reschke spent the next few years creating the foundation for Project: Tuebor, and trying to raise money to turn his idea into a reality.

“We had a phenomenal failure on Kickstarter in 2012,” he said. “I learned a lot of tough life lessons that year. But we hadn’t given up.”

But, by the following year, Reschke had raised enough money to leave his day job and pursue his project full-time. At the start of this year, an investor made an offer and Reschke was able to hire 24 full-time employees, 20 of them in Lansing.

One of the big reasons Reschke chose Michigan was the Digital Media Act (formerly known as the Film Tax Credit). For qualified projects, it will return a percent of the development expenses to the studio once the product has been shipped. That reduces the risks for investors, Reschke said, and gives the studio time to make any post-launch adjustments.

One of the reasons he chose Lansing is its proximity to Michigan State University, Central Michigan University and Ferris State University, all three of which have video game development programs.

“We’re centrally located. You’ve got all these universities in Michigan that are graduating all of this talent, and they’ve got nowhere to go,” says Reschke said.

Though, increasingly, they do.

The video game industry in Michigan is small but it’s growing. The website gamedevmap lists more than 13 video game studios in Michigan, companies such as Swamiware in Ann Arbor, S2 Games in Kalamazoo, Stardock in Plymouth, and Pixo in Royal Oak. (There’s also SophSoft in East Lansing, which the site misses.) Some date back to the early 1990s, but most are of far more recent vintage.

As of May 2015, the Michigan Film Office has paid more than $530,000 for video game projects.

According to Brian Winn, director of the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) lab at Michigan State University, the video game marketplace is currently expanding dramatically due to an increase in gamers and platforms. Currently the market is shifting towards mobile gaming- games on cell phones, tablets, and other handheld devices, he said.

Project: Tuebor is set in a future shaped by over 4,000 years of war and evolution accelerated by technology and genetic alterations. Players can choose roles from among four different factions, the Mutates, the Psionic, the BioMech or the Pure, each competing to be the dominant race and offering a different storyline.

The game is designed to be played online and will feature several different player vs. player, player vs. environment and cooperative play modes. It is expected to be released for PC in the spring of next year.

“(Our team) has done a fantastic job,” said Reschke. “It’s super gratifying. There’s no other feeling I’ve ever had in the world like it of going from just this silly idea I had and having these very skilled people turn it into reality.”

On the Web

Strength in Numbers Game Studio

www.tueborgame.com