I had worked with Marguerite on a smaller game the semester before called Flutter. I’ll post it at some point, as it was a great little art game inspired by Flower. We worked well together and shared a lot of similar views on game development, but I didn’t expect the phone call in Montreal when she asked if I was interested in starting a game company after school. She said she knew this programmer, Mike Hopke, who was on board as well. I said yes, but really nothing came out of it for a long while. We didn’t do much, but talk about plans and imagine what we would do until I got back and showed them the prototype.
Immediately they agreed that the game had a lot of potential and wanted to polish it. But school came first and with it Production II. Marguerite introduced me to Mike, and we formed a team in production II, so that we could get to know one another and at least have the experience of working together before driving ahead on the production of Loc.
Well, as luck would have it, Matt Brand was also in our class and he also joined our team. It was a fun semester, we ended up creating a lemmings like side scrolling game in Unity. The semester ended and I was already planning on staying during the summer since I worked for Champlain IT, Mike was a summer RA and Marguerite lived in Burlington at the time.
So we went to work on what would be Loc. Marguerite was the one who initially proposed the art direction we went in, and just like any designer I said No. Absolutely Not. But I was being dumb/selfish, and she was totally right. I folded a day or two later, after seeing the wisdom behind creating a unique identity for the game.
Problems began pretty quickly when Mike realized the mountain of code that was looming over him. I had asked Matt before break if he was potentially interested in working with us, and at that time he was excited. We called him up and in that moment Birnam Wood Games was formed.
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