Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by ex-LucasArts game veteran and President and Chief Creative Officer of Escape Hatch Entertainment, Garry Gaber. Escape Hatch hope to bring space combat game Starlight Inception to the PC and PlayStation Vita via Kickstarter. We asked him to tell us about himself, the game, and why you should think about helping to fund the game in an exclusive article.
I remember playing games like Wing Commander and Star Wars: X-Wing for hours, days, sometimes so much that I would barely be able to keep my eyes open during my day job, anticipating the next time when I might be able to get behind the joystick again and kick some enemy ass.
That, along with a love of storytelling and science fiction was what prompted me to apply for a job in the entertainment industry. I would work 10 hour days as a Computer Aided Designer and then come home and work another shift creating 3D art and studying (or was it playing) the beautiful gameplay and graphics of those games and others of the same era. Eventually, I landed a job at LucasArts Entertainment Company as a 3D artist, and my wife, cat and I climbed into a Mitsubishi Eclipse and started driving west…
I wound up working at LucasArts for ten awesome years, being a part of games like Star Wars: Jedi Knight, Star Wars: Rebel Assault II, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi, and others. When the company had enough confidence in my design and production skills, they promoted me to Project Leader and I designed, wrote, built (with an amazing team of creative and talented individuals) Star Wars: Force Commander, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, and the expansion pack Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds Clone Campaigns.
After I left LucasArts in 2004, I got in the car again, driving southwest to Austin to start Escape Hatch Entertainment. Except this time, my wife and I had a newborn son along for the ride. At Escape Hatch Entertainment, we took on a new challenge: trying to devise a game that could teach. And do it on a budget that was a fraction of what I was used to at LucasArts. We found wild success with this endeavor, not monetarily, but in the numbers of students that we helped discover history through Discover Babylon, immunology through Immuneattack, and building science through a large project for the Department of Energy meant to retrain unemployed workers by giving them new skills. And while all this was going on, I found time to give back to the community by teaching at our local community college, and to have another son.
But I still remembered those days playing space combat simulations, and burned to make one of my own, something that wasn’t quite Wing Commander and not quite X-Wing, but something new and fresh and unique.
Which brings me to why I’m here, to introduce our new game project, Starlight Inception, for Sony PlayStation Vita and PC.
To find out more about the game, and see a PSLS exclusive image of the game, turn to page two.
