Glass Robot urges gamers to make their own Super Mario

Timing has been on Glass Robot’s side thus far. Three days after graduating with computer science degrees from DIT, the four members of the mobile games studio managed to grab free business premises from their college for three months.

Then with funds dwindling and a week left before they had to vacate the offices to make way for other start-ups, they managed to impress the Telefónica-backed Wayra Academy with their idea of user-generated games to the tune of a €50,000 investment.

That came with shiny new office space in the O2 building along Dublin’s docklands and a chance to properly develop their concept.

“We basically didn’t want to go out and get into a boring, monotonous job, so we went out and did something for ourselves,” explains chief executive and co-founder Keith McCormac.

He, alongside the company's other founding members – Adam Drakeford (chief operating officer), Johnny Murphy (chief commercial officer) and chief technical officer Darren McKeever – graduated from the Dublin institute last May, and were encouraged by their digital games lecturer, Bryan Duggan, to start up a company of their own.

Initially the Glass Robot team worked on a mobile concept called Mini Matches which, says McCormac, "was basically like Draw Something but instead of creating sketches, you're going through a load of mini games".

Background concept
In the background they had a concept for user-generated levels that allow players to create new game content using an editing tool.

However, after an unsuccessful pitch to the NDRC's LaunchPad program they were recommended to bring the user-generated feature front and centre. "We then pitched that idea to Wayra and they really liked it. Then once we got in there, it really developed."

That was last September and the company is now set to release its debut game – a 2D platformer called Blake Justice: Project Hero – for iPhone and iPad by the end of the month. Some final tweaks will be made during a month-long test version release in the New Zealand market, "then we're going to go worldwide for iOS, then after that we'll focus on Windows and Android," adds McCormac.

Explaining the game itself, which has previously been described as "Super Mario meets Batman", McCormac says: "It's like being able to make your own Super Mario levels and then you can share them with your friends through Facebook or Twitter. "

The story revolves around a "superhero who has lost his powers", and in-app purchases combined with a "freemium" release – modelled on the example set by App Store phenomenon Temple Run – are the keys to making a profit for the four founders.

"You don't have to create levels if you don't want to," says McCormac, "it might be only 10 per cent [of players] that actually do, but that's more than enough to make sure the game isn't running out of content. Say if you get Angry Birds and you have 60 levels, you run out of them pretty quickly and then you have to wait for a few months for the update. But when other users are making them all the time – as they can with Blake Justice – it's far different, you could have thousands of levels in a very short space of time."

Learning curve
With four computer science graduates in charge, McCormac admits that areas such as finance, marketing and general business duties have meant it has been a "big learning curve" since stepping into the Wayra offices last year, though a constant stream of mentors being brought in to meet the companies housed there has helped "push us in the right direction".

For now, McCormac and Drakeford are managing the business side of things while also helping out on the technical front when needed, while Murphy and McKeever concentrate solely on working on the actual game. With the company actively looking for seed funding to help continue their progress, McCormac says the next few months will be hugely important, though he adds there has been “some interest” after recent presentations to potential investors.

"We all wanted to work in the games industry but that's really hard in Ireland, " adds McCormac. "The only way to really do it is to go out and do it yourself."