Cameron Maddox, a junior at Mississippi State University, was “just chilling one day” in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach when he found a new video game on one of the computers.
He soon found himself playing it for two hours with Landon Casey, who graduated from MSU in May.
They took the opportunity to play it again Thursday evening on Drill Field, where about 30 other MSU students and graduates gathered to watch and play a new fighting video game, Slayers for Hire, developed by two-time MSU graduate Ryan Gilbrech.
“I love this style of game,” Casey said. “It’s fun for parties, and not many games can appeal to this many people.”
Gilbrech earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2012 but returned to MSU for a master’s in business administration in 2014, with the intention of utilizing the degree and the entrepreneurship center to start Meta Games, the business behind Slayers for Hire.
“I figured I could teach myself the rest, like the programming and the art stuff, or I could build a team, but the business side was something I had no concept of,” Gilbrech said.
He was the only member of the team when Meta Games formed five years ago, but it expanded to include his brother, Brandon, who is in charge of marketing, and 17 others who live in a variety of countries, according to the website.
Gilbrech has played Nintendo’s widely popular Super Smash Bros. series of video games competitively for 12 years and found the industry surprisingly lacking in games similar to it, he said.
“(I thought,) I know how this game ticks and I think I could put my own spin on this,” he said.
The entrepreneurial spirit
The E-Center, located in the College of Business, supports more than 100 active startups created by MSU students.
“They literally walk in the E-Center door and say ‘I have an idea,’ and our job is to try to create this ecosystem to bring it to life,” outreach director Jeffrey Rupp said.
The E-Center helps provide funding, networking opportunities, prototype development, team building education and anything else that will help student entrepreneurs succeed, Rupp said.
“We do not dismiss any idea,” he said. “The marketplace will tell you whether it’s good or bad.”
One E-Center success story is Glo Cubes, liquid-activated light-up ice cubes co-created by Columbus native Hagan Walker, who attended Thursday’s event. The company started in 2015, is based in downtown Starkville and employs 15 people, he said.
The event provided some Glo Cubes along with pizza, cookies and drinks. Players took turns huddling around a laptop connected to a large screen.
Gilbrech’s passion for both business and the gaming market is impressive, E-Center entrepreneurship director Eric Hill said.
“This company was born out of that determination, but also meeting a need in the market that he understands gamers really wanted,” Hill said.
Details of the game
Gilbrech did not initially plan to create original characters and instead wanted to use characters from indie game studios, but his plan changed when he started working with concept artists, he said.
The character lineup is currently an archer, an artist, a dragon, a boxer, a spy and a machine-driven fighter called the Slugger. Each has an individual fighting style.
The underlying theme of the game “explores the idea of humanity growing apart from nature” and closer to technology, and each character falls somewhere in the spectrum between the two, Gilbrech said.
“We didn’t even talk about gameplay at the time,” he said. “It was all about the characters, and we wanted to make (those) and afterwards make the gameplay make sense.”
The game is currently all combat and will eventually have a story mode that explores the characters and the world they live in, Gilbrech said.
“Our philosophy with this was to make sure that the foundation of the game was very, very solid, so we started with the characters themselves and then honestly lucked out like crazy with the programming talent,” he said.
The business and game were largely funded by the Bulldog Angel Network, a group of MSU alumni that provide investments to companies in their early stages run by MSU students and alumni. Pitching the project to investors was “very humbling and very nerve-wracking,” Gilbrech said.
The game is available for free on Discord, a voice and text chat app for gamers, and Meta Games will launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in the next few weeks to keep the project going, Gilbrech said.
There is no ending to the game at the moment, he said.
“You win by being the best player, but other people are going to get better too, so that’s kind of the fun of all of it,” he said.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 37 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.