September is proving an incredible experience for our Cyberspline team. We didn’t expect events to move so fast given the Covid-19 mandated slowdown of 2020. Our company is a start up, having grown from a diverse group working remotely from home offices (often with no idea of what their work would mean) to a funded project working out of an office space in Burnaby, BC.
Canada Media Fund
Cyberspline Games is the result of a shared passion; an idea conceived by our project designer Luca Cresciullo and his wife Ekaterina (Katya) who are both avid video gamers. As highly productive and creative individuals with backgrounds in law, mechanical engineering, and mathematics, Luca and Katya determined that they would turn their love of video games into a profession.
Luca is a graduate of the Vancouver Film School (VFS) specializing in game design. He assembled a team of fellow VFS graduates and game design enthusiasts. Ideas and concepts took shape, and within a year they had the makings of an exciting new game. But the company knew that passion and dedication would need the structure of a professional organization. The team had been working for free, but more talent would be required. To realize the game’s full potential “we needed to hire the right talent without having to make compromises in technical responsibilities” says Luca.
Each team member had to focus on their own skill sets. The company approached the Canada Media Fund with a proposal and budget, and after a few tense weeks of waiting in May 2020, CMF agreed that Cyberspline Games had something promising in the making. “It’s validation that there’s a market out there for the game, and that [investors] are confident in how the business is being handled” asserts Deny Senesouma, Cyberspline’s gameplay programmer. Operating under the name BoomBox , Canada Media Fund has brought together a diverse group of creators who are working to release the game by early 2021.
BoomBox Development Team
The development team is primarily Canadian, but we do have a few international developers whose path to Cyberspline Games underscores the value of CMF’s faith in our Company.
Bruno Costa’s specialty in 3D visuals relating to programming and art, led him from the Faculty of Medicine and the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Mexico to the Vancouver Film School (VFS) where he completed a Programming for Games diploma. Bruno claims that it was primarily his then girlfriend’s aspiration to study game design in Vancouver. When they parted ways, he stuck to the plan. Timing and opportunity did the rest, and Bruno is now Cyberspline’s game level developer. CMF has enabled him to do what he has always dreamed of doing.
For Alberto Valdez, a bachelor’s degree holder from Tec de Monterrey in music production engineering, CMF has given him the opportunity to work in an industry that he has been working for 8 years to join. A fellow VFS graduate in sound design, he is Cyberspline’s music composer and sound designer.
Canada Media Fund has given Cyberspline Games the impetus to work toward project completion. Katya, our company’s CEO, sees it this way: “The hope that we would get that funding helped motivate us to work on the game, and the receipt of CMF funding was a huge event for us, where we realized that we are an actual studio now and there is no way back!”