00:05I'm David, I'm the MD and one of the founders of Skyhook Games and I'm excited to talk to you
00:10today about our Kickstarter campaign for lawnmowing simulator 2. From day one Skyhook Games was set
00:15up as an outsourcing studio. During the 12 years that Skyhook has been going we've worked on many
00:19different games for lots of clients. We've worked on projects covering fishing simulators, flight
00:24simulators and train simulators but we've always had ambition to make our own games. We tried quite
00:29a few things over the years but nothing really stuck. Then one day I was taking my youngest son
00:33to school and I noticed that the council were cutting the grass in the park and I just saw
00:37the potential and the gameplay elements in in front of me. I'm Rick Payne and I'm the game
00:41director on lawnmowing simulator 2. When we first started developing lawnmowing simulator a few of
00:46us kind of went down a rabbit hole of trying to understand all of the different mowers and the
00:50types that were available and decided that we had to have authentic mowers from real world
00:54manufacturers in the game. It's been fantastic having the manufacturers on board. We have access
00:59to the real world manufacturing CAD files so we can be completely sure that the models we are
01:03creating are 100% accurate. They've also given us access to recording the mowers out in the wild so
01:08that we can take the actual audio of the mowers and put it straight into the game. For the sequel
01:12there
01:12was no question that it had to be in the US. The way we've developed lawnmowing simulator 2 is to
01:18create a system where contracts can have any number of different tasks on them. You'll start off quite
01:23small and then as you start to build up your fleet and your business and your reputation in the town
01:28you'll start to unlock larger locations from residential ones up to certain businesses around
01:33the town. The better you do and the more well you know you become in the area the more you'll
01:37add to
01:37your client list. A big new feature in lawnmowing simulator 2 is the addition of a fully explorable
01:42HQ that the player owns. In that space they'll be able to set up their company id, the name,
01:47the uniform and select the contracts that they want to attempt. Leafblowing was a top rated community
01:53wish in the first game that we are happy to include in the sequel. Some of the features that we're
01:57including in lawnmowing simulator 2 wouldn't be there without the wishes of the community. The team
02:02were amazed by how much the community got behind us. And we never could have anticipated when we first
02:08started making the game that the game would now have been played by over three million players across
02:12all platforms. After weighing up the pros and cons we decided that self-publishing was the way to go.
02:16This allowed us to keep control of the game and make the game that we and the community really want.
02:21We are fully funded to release a version of lawnmowing simulator 2. What the Kickstarter allows
02:26us to do is bring the community closer to the development with rewards like naming content in
02:31the game. The extra funding will also allow us to add extra polish and bring the best evasion of
02:35the game to market we can all be proud of.
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