Things have certainly changed since the days of playing Super Nintendo, especially for two graduates of UCF’s Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, Tim Tryzbiak and Scott Pellico.<\/p>\n
The pair founded ootii, an interactive entertainment company in Orlando started as part of UCF’s Business Incubation Program.<\/p>\n
The business incubation program is a university-driven community partnership providing developing companies with the tools, training and infrastructure to become successful enterprises.<\/p>\n
Tryzbiak and Pellico started ootii while earning their master’s degrees at UCF. The company focuses creating action-based social games.<\/p>\n
Tryzbiak said that traditional gamers are beginning to play on social platforms, such as Facebook, more frequently. And though most of the games are casual, there is a growing need for story-driven, action games.<\/p>\n
This, the blending of casual and hard-core gaming, is ootii’s niche market.<\/p>\n
“We believe that the social medium is kept to the casual gamer,” Pellico said. “We want to create a game that captures the sense of casual gaming with hard-core gaming and strategy.”<\/p>\n
Hard-core games typically incorporate strategy and adventure with action, and they generally demand large quantities of time. These games cost around $60.<\/p>\n
Casual games, typically found on social platforms, do not involve heavy doses of strategy and incorporate social media. They are free to play and often have content available to purchase.<\/p>\n
The pair’s first game, “Relic Ball,” is a physics-based game (like “Angry Birds”) merged with strategy and adventure (like most hard-core games).<\/p>\n
This is the formula they hope will be a successful merger of the sense of casual gaming on a social platform and the strategy largely incorporated into hard-core games.<\/p>\n
“A game that we can play and our moms can play,” Pellico said.<\/p>\n
A six-month project, “Relic Ball” will be launched in a couple weeks for open play.<\/p>\n
At that point, anyone can go on Facebook and play the game, and Tryzbiak and Pellico are hoping to measure the response from users and improve the content.<\/p>\n
“We love feedback,” Tryzbiak said. “The goal is to share and be open with the community.”<\/p>\n
The team has a blog that tracks the development of the game (blog.ootii.com) and will announce the launch of the alpha version, which will be playable to anyone.<\/p>\n
Though the ootii team is made up of traditional gamers, playing mostly on consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation, it realizes that a budding company does not have the resources to build a game for those platforms.<\/p>\n
Instead, it turned to the Facebook platform, which allows for more accessibility and flexibility for developers.<\/p>\n
Tryzbiak said the social platform allows “two guys with a sort of unique idea and a little bit of support from UCF” to build, publish and promote their content.<\/p>\n
It also is a growing industry, estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars in 2012, according to reports from Inside Network and Social Game Observer.<\/p>\n
Additionally, many social platform games get more plays in a day than many console games get in a lifetime, Tryzbiak said.<\/p>\n
Tryzbiak is the programmer while Pellico is the graphics artist. They started ootii as a capstone project while at UCF’s Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy.<\/p>\n
In addition to being students, they worked on the company part time until graduating in December, after which they have been working full time for a little more than two months.<\/p>\n
The pair went from playing games on Super Nintendo to designing them for the billion-dollar industry that gaming has become.<\/p>\n
“Needless to say, this a pretty exciting time,” Tryzbiak said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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