Help bring this DC studio’s first mobile game to life

Defcon Games was birthed in July of 2015 around the same time as I was organizing indie game conference Betacade 001.
A week before the event, my cofounder (who was, at the time, just my friend) Matt Key and I decided to take up a challenge and see who had the better idea for a game. We took the week to prepare a pitch to present to a mutual mentor at the World of Beer in Arlington, Va., just outside of D.C. The mentor made his selection — my idea (!), DeadDots, a mobile game where you protect one dot from all the bad dots — and thus, we had our first game. When we left, we stopped outside and had a serious conversation. Matt and I laid out our expectations, responsibilities and work availabilities. Although the name wasn’t etched in stone until September, Defcon Games was born.
Now, we’re trying to finish DeadDots, our first game. But we need to raise some money.
Making games of any scope in general is rather expensive and we’ve done a remarkable job in bootstrapping during the first year. Defcon Games has nine members, many of whom work remotely, working steadfast for the love of the game or just the experience. We got to a point this spring where bootstrapping started becoming more difficult. The game wasn’t close to being ready for the App Store and our initial personal investment started to run low. In May 2016, we began crafting the campaign, rewards and video storyboard. In June, the video took about 10 hours in total to shoot and edit.
Our goal is $7,500 and we’ve raised more than $1,600 so far. The campaign ends Nov. 4. I’m proud our company is based in D.C. and I hope that the D.C. community can get behind our fun little project.
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Here’s a bit more about the game itself. DeadDots’ original concept was a dot in the middle of the screen that you had to protect from bad dots that could appear from anywhere around the phone. After a few brainstorming sessions, we quickly realized that we wanted a storyline, old-school-like power-ups and different enemy types to make it more interesting.
In writing the backstory, I looked at our initial character concepts and knew this had to be an outerspace setting. These characters looked like nothing normal, yet I was determined to bring them into a real-life setting. The time period then became a few hundred years after we had settlements on neighboring planets like Mars (great timing on that one, thanks Elon). I then had to figure out a believable story that placed our players orbiting an alien-inhabited planet in a gunship. If you watch our video on the campaign and read the first few story summaries, you’ll see that the story plays out quite smoothly, if I do say so myself. I can’t wait to see the animation that we’re putting together for the game’s intro.