Hi! I’m Kyle Kulyk, Managing Director of Itzy Interactive Inc. For our first Dev Blog for the new Lucas site, I thought I’d introduce myself and give you a quick overview of our company story!
I grew up in rural Alberta and has been an avid gamer since my first days of playing Gorf on my Commodore Vic-20. After spending countless hours entering and modifying game code from Compute’s Gazette magazines on my C-64 (which I adored at the time), I never lost my love for gaming even as I eventually chose a career in finance in Edmonton, Alberta. While working in the brokerage industry I always remained an avid gamer and blogger, writing for years on everything gaming and game industry related. Then came the crash of 2009. Suddenly, my career path was in shambles. So what does any sane 30 something with no job, no career path and their first child on the way do? Why, go back to school and then start a video game studio, of course!
I few years and many game dev and programming courses later, I teamed up with my longtime friend and programmer, William Iftody, and Itzy Interactive was born, named for the title character in our first, spider themed mobile game. Will and I released 3 mobile titles at a time when mobile games were suddenly all free to play. While we won some awards for our efforts, we never achieved any commercial success in the mobile market. We then decided to shift into PC and console games and find ourselves a happy little niche.
It here that we received funding from the Canadian Media Fund and were able to prototype our first PC/Console game, Mad Devils, an isometric, cooperative, twin stick shooter set in a supernatural/WWII themed universe. It was during this process that David Murdoch became intrigued by the world we were building in MD and applied for an ad for a concept artist. His artwork gave us a new, darker direction for Mad Devils that absolutely fit the world we were looking to portray. We’re presently polishing up Mad Devils for release in the near future.
Here we are, a few years later and David, an avid horror fan, is our Art Director on Lucas: Chapter One, a 1 vs 4 vs 1 take on the survival/horror multiplayer genre based on his own, well received graphic novel, Lucas, from a few years earlier with further support from the Canadian Media Fund. We’re all excited to launch this page to share what we’ve been working on since last October as we finish up our prototype and look to take Lucas: Chapter One into the production phase!
Check this site regularly for updates, follow us on Twitter, join us on Discord and sign up for our Newsletter in the bottom, right hand corner to come along with us on this ride!
Bye for now!
Kyle
