To accompany our review of the game, we sat down with Glum Buster's sole creator, Justin Leingang, for a discussion about the game and its intriguing sales model.

My name is Justin Leingang. During the daytime, I work in the commercial video games industry. During the nighttime, I transform and create games on my own for non-commercial release.

With Glum Buster, I took a radically different approach than I commonly do when designing and planning a game. I usually start with a core play mechanic as a foundation to build upon and a gravity to focus everything else around. However, with this game I founded everything on a basic set of coordinated physical interactions: interacting in some way with one hand while quickly interacting in a coordinated manner, but always in very different ways, with the other hand. I wanted to explore, learn, and challenge myself to develop game mechanics and play systems that all grew from and revolved around those same physical interaction principals. This is what led me into taking such a different approach to all aspects of the game design.

After building the initial prototype, I began exploring a few different ways in which the aforementioned principals could be applied. As I put these together, I would discover and imagine even more ways to apply the principals. When I put those together, I would discover even more. On top of this, I was continuously daydreaming and having dreams at night about the game. All of these fuelled and combined with the actual development work I was doing at any point in time.

This process just kept feeding itself and reciprocating as development continued. So, you can definitely mark it up as an iterative process, and that not much was decided beforehand. It was indeed quite a fun, challenging, and educational process.

Charityware is software created and offered with the purpose of raising money to help those in need.

Glum Buster is a free game that players can decide to pay any amount they choose if they feel the game is worth it. A decreasing percentage of the payments goes to me for the game, and an increasing percentage of the payments goes to the Starlight Children's Foundation charity. As the number of people that pay increases, the less income I get for the game and the greater the contribution to the charity.

If you aren't familiar with the Starlight Children's Foundation, I highly encourage you to check it out - what they're working for and stand for is simply amazing and light-years beyond noble. Their cause humbles me, and it's one of the big reasons I chose to make Glum Buster charityware.

Starlight serves to bring joy to those who are truly challenged to find it in their own lives.

Video games are created to entertain others - to bring them enjoyment, learning, and inspiration.

The two seem to match nicely, don't they? And, I hope that I don't get more money from this model. The entire structure of the model is intended to make me get less and less money, and for the charity to get more and more money.