Hamilton start-up’s game up for national award

Local electronic-game maker Wraith Games hopes you and your friends will play its first major game to be released for sale, Collapsus, and then vote for it as the best independent game that will be released next year.

“Last year, we were actually chosen as (Slide DB, a mobile and tablet games website’s) best up-and-coming game, along with four other games,” said company founder Jay Kidd. “The thing with that is, Slide DB is a much smaller competition, whereas (the gaming website) Indie DB’s Indy-of-the-Year award is massive.”

Kidd hopes Collapsus can win in the category of Best Upcoming Game.

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Collapsus is a game where players win points by destroying blocks to connect four of the same kind in a row. Unlike most games of the kind, when the player turns the phone or Fire Tablet 90 degrees in either direction, or 180 degrees, the gravity of the game changes 90 degrees, or 180. Also unique: Eight players can compete simultaneously.

For that to happen, people must vote the game into the Top 100 of the games before Sunday evening, Dec. 10. Those who rank among the Top 100 will move to the second round, where votes are reset to zero. Voting on the final round ends in late December.

Wraith Games is part of the Hamilton Mill business accelerator, which helps startups grow with help of mentors and other assistance.

“So far, Collapsus has gotten a lot of traction,” Kidd said.

To play a pre-release version of the game for free (a donation is suggested), go to https://wraithgames.itch.io/collapsus .

Voting for the game can be found at indiedb.com/games/collapsus .

The company hopes to complete the game late this year, with the release for sale during the first quarter of 2018.

Wraith Games “started when I was in high school,” Kidd said.

“We were just a group of friends who decided to make some video games. We had absolutely no clue what we were doing,” he previously told the Journal-News.

Kidd started at Fairfield High School and graduated in 2008 from the Butler Tech School for the Arts in Hamilton. By graduation, Wraith had about 30 “small-game prototypes that we’d worked on, that we ended up releasing online for free,” he previously said. “… It was a learning process.”

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