I recently had the opportunity to interview Kenney Vleugels, best known for his work with Armor Studios, the official development brand for Armor Games. This was quite an interesting interview, because Kenney has made a very good living making generic mini-games, and he was brave enough to chat with me knowing full-well my opinions on such games.

Kenney, like many, got started with his career at a very early age. In 2004, at the age of 14, he had developed his first Flash game, and was shortly contacted by Daniel McNeely of Armor Games.

Daniel was impressed with Kenney’s first game and was hoping to pick up the young talent to help promote Armor Games, which was still in it’s infancy at the time.

Kenney had developed a new game called Mario’s Time Attack, a very simple Super Mario game where you run through a series of levels to give a deserted princess peach some water before the time limit runs out.

The game was simple, but kind of fun, and so he was offered a $500 Armor Games sponsorship. For a 14 year old who was only on his 2nd game ever, $500 was a fortune!

His parents did not approve of the idea.

His mother worried these games would interfere with his education, and his father was weary of the legalities involved due to his age. But, like any 14 year old with a $500 carrot dangled in front of him, he took the sponsorship behind their backs.

“They had this perfect story of me getting money for making games. Of course, I couldn’t say no but my parents were a little fishy about this since it didn’t sound really legit. … I just went on with it. Come on, it was my dream!”

“I signed up for PayPal and combined it to my Junior bank account” he said. ” After I got my first payment I almost pissed myself, Bill Gates; Here I come.”

Kenney told me how, after his first paid game, he decided to really push himself and make his next title something more innovative. Mario’s Time Attack used ripped sprites from licensed Nintendo titles, so this time he wanted to do more of his own art. He developed a web-cam game called ‘Dress Up Yourself‘, where you can drag goofy eyes, facial hair, teeth, etc.. onto your own webcam image.

While the webcam was innovative, and he certainly put more effort into the game, the end result wasn’t as well received as his previous title, and so his next sponsorship offer was noticeably lower.

“Because that [first] game was made using sprites, I had a hard time making my next which should contain my own art. So it took me fairly long before I made my next game, I just showed it to them and they gave me a certain amount which I forgot (I wasn’t very happy about it though) and I published it.”

Before talking to Kenney, I took a stroll through his collection of games. What I found was far from impressive. I was able to see the appeal of “Mario’s Time Attack”, but could also understand why “Dress Up Yourself” wasn’t so well received. The game merely took your webcam image and let you drag stuff onto it. More of a gadget than a game.

In fact, Kenney’s game library consisted mainly of unimpressive mini-games, many of which were clones of other games that had recently seen success on other sites (compare Jack Russell to Line Rider, for example), and sequels of said games. I asked him about this.

“Yeah, making lot’s of mini-games for AG earns you more than making 1 or 2 large and expansive games. So that kinda kept me making small games.”

Posted in Interviews, Gaming News | 33 Comments

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