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City Shaper: Colby Breidenstein

This week's City Shaper is Colby Breidenstein. He's the founder of Snow Day Software.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The next video game you buy might be made by this week's City Shaper.

Colby Breidenstein has a nine-to-five job, but he also owns his own software company - and does a lot of that work at the Tri-Main Center in Buffalo.

2 On Your Side’s Kelly Dudzik recently visited with Breidenstein at Buffalo Game Space at the Tri-Main Center to talk with him about his latest project.

"It's a sci-fi top-down kind of arcade game. Kind of like Asteriods-ish where you're just kind of shooting robots," explained Breidenstein when Dudzik asked about the game's theme.

And when Breidenstein isn't working as a software developer for a health care company, he's busy building Hovership Havoc.

"Goofy sci-fi, you know, just fun and easy to pick up and play kind of thing where you're a spaceship and you're just going shoot other little robots," he says.

Breidenstein is the founder of Snow Day Software. He grew up in West Seneca, went to ECC and UB, and got a job as a computer programmer. His boss encouraged him to explore the video game development side of the industry. Five or six years ago, Breidenstein started using the Kinect camera on his Xbox to build his own software.

"I basically started creating like a physical therapy application using that. So, it was a lot of the same stuff as a normal game would be made of," he says.

That's how he got started making games. He launched Snow Day Software four years ago.

"Since then, I've been making my game, Hovership Havoc, now for Xbox and PC for about three years now," says Breidenstein.

This year, Breidenstein entered a contest put on by the state for game developers.

"We had to make a business plan, a timeline and a demo and a video of our plans," he says. "I got second place for it, so that helped, you know, I won a cash prize for that and that's helped me very much for my development for this game."

Buffalo Game Space at the Tri-Main Center has also been a huge resource. That's how Breidenstein met artists, musicians and others interested in game development. He says he's thrilled to be part of Buffalo's tech scene.

"It's super exciting because, I mean, I always hated seeing my friends when they'd leave, of course, and go to a different city or whatever, but I had never had a reason to want to leave because I was lucky enough to get a job as soon as I finished college, and I'm still at the same job since I finished college, and I'm happy to be a part of it for sure," says Breidenstein.

Breidenstein expects Hovership Havoc to come out in January. Hovership Havoc will be released for Xbox and PCs.

You can nominate someone to be a Buffalo City Shaper by sending Kelly an email.

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