Description

Our Mission: Invite all gamers to play cooperatively.

2011 - Mobile Era

Back when the iPhone App Store was considered novel, Alex spent many years self-developing and publishing games, mostly for the iOS platform. 12 games to be exact, with approxiamtely 3 games every year. None of them were particularly interesting or groundbreaking, but rather an opportunity to explore what it meant to build products end to end and try out different marketing strategies and game design. At this time, the brand was called KeitGames (in reference to Alex's common username at the time: Keitzer), and was located in the Cleveland area of northern Ohio.

2015 - Indefinite Hiatus

But around 2015 the game development was put on pause while Alex started working full time on non-game iOS applications for various businesses. The KeitGames brand sat idle while the apps slowly left the App Store from Apple's constant policy changes. There was no telling when the game development would pick back up, as other life things had taken up importance. During this time, Alex also got extremely involved with non-game entrepreneurship and how to build a business, giving inspiration for how to scale digital products when the time comes.

2019 - Rebrand

After many years of not making any games, Alex rebranded the company from KeitGames to Pixel Diamond Games. Not only making it easier to spell when hearing the name verbally, but also giving better logo design and industry-specific terminology. This also meant a shift in the hiatus: signaling it was nearing its end.

2022 - Revival

Post-Covid, post-startup obsessed, and now living in San Francisco, Alex decided to dive head first back into game development, this time with a focus on building high quality games that people actually care about (as opposed to cheeky simple games built as a failed money grab attempt). And with his newfound awareness of how a company fills a gap in the market, combined with his desire to build something he would actually want to play with his friends, Alex had the idea to focus on Cooperative games as a brand identity, and start with a console game that can be played with friends in the same room (aka couch co-op). And first up on the list: Tombstone Taxi.

2023 - Growth

After about 6 months of development with his friend Peter, and demoing Tombstone Taxi at the Game Developer's Expo (GDEX) in Columbus, OH in June of 2023, Alex was approached by Miles (a student at the Uni of Pittsburgh, PA) about potentially joining the team. And that kickstarted the explosive growth of the team from August 2023 until April 2024 going from a team size of 2 up to 8. On top of that, multiple demos had been given including a GDC afterparty in March and a talk given to the SF Game Dev meetup group in January.

2024 - The Future

There's not much to read here at this moment... We're yet to carve this path. Come with us on this journey.

Projects

• Tombstone Taxi