Spotlight On: Muse Games

The folks over at Muse Games love their Chinatown dumplings. Therefore, when it came time to choose, East or West, co-founder Austin Lane said the team decided to stay.

“We relish our growing NYC indie developer scene,” Lane said. “If it really becomes necessary, we’ll begrudgingly make our way out of the cold gray lofts into the California sunshine.”

Securely nestled into the city is good. Muse is a confirmation to those wondering if they can afford to live and develop in NYC. The answer is yes.  The indie label released the steam punk air-pirate game Guns of Icarus on Monday, and is working on many other projects.

“We are releasing our first iPhone game, Extreme Sledding,” Lane said. “In the past month we’ve opened up our first round of developer APIs, assimilated our first outside title and launched a $10,000 game prototyping challenge.”

Despite the busy schedule, employees at Muse are always focused on their primary goal:  to improve gaming on the web. Lane said developers work around problems like poor technology, poor user experience and signal to noise ratio to complete and publish each game.

“We are also providing a replicable solution to the indie community,” Lane said. “Really though, we just wanted an excuse to carry our childhood imaginations well into our twenties.”

According to Lane, there is a transition happening based on bandwith speed, computing power and a society that is shifting toward gaming as a mainstream social and entertainment outlet. He said this “perfect storm” allows Muse to create games that outshine the current state of gaming on the web.

 “We bring the level of graphics and experience you’d expect in hardcore genres to a more accessible casual gaming experience,” Lane said. “Holistically, our goal is to evolve gaming on the web.” 

Evolving the web-gaming experience would not be possible without the best tools. Lane said Muse’s most effective weapon is the Unity 3D engine. After working with Unity for three years, Lane calls the program amazing and user-friendly.

“It allows you to easily build and deploy really quality experiences to several different platforms,” Lane said. “What we do at Muse wouldn’t be possible without the engine technology Unity has developed.”

Muse Games is just one of many thriving game companies in the city. Check back soon for other profiles on the developers in your area.

More Info: Muse Games-Guns of Icarus-Unity-Extreme Sledding