STUGAN 2016
8th July - 27th August 2016
Teams at Stugan 2016:
Team 1: Andrew Shouldice & Secret Legend
Team 2: Matthew Gatland & Caves
Team 3: Tom Francis & Heat Signature
Team 4: Karen Teixeira & Astromantica
Team 5: Pol and Armel & Vignettes
Team 6: Auston and Diana & CatDate
Team 7: Andreas Schönau & Spin Up
Team 8: Ivan Notaroš & House of Flowers
Team 9: Mira and Tanja & Tick Tock
Team 10: Niklas Hallin & Baby Elephant Walk
Team 11: Laura and Michael & Thin Air
Team 12: Dorianne, Robbie and Marc & Kingdom in the Sky
Team 13: Julie, Nicolas and Xavier & Castle Hustle
Trailer of the projects that are going to be at Stugan 2016:
Andrew Shouldice lives in Halifax, Canada, and is the designer, developer, and artist for Secret Legend. Also contributing are the illustrious POWER UP AUDIO on sound design, and world-class musician LIFEFORMED with an all-new soundtrack.
Secret Legend is an isometric action-adventure about a tiny fox in a big world. Embark on a courageous triangle-seek set in that place just beyond the farthest you've ever been. Explore the countryside, fight monsters, and find secrets in this award-winning adventure. Don't be discouraged if you fail — you're not meant to be here anyway.
Matthew Gatland is a game developer from New Zealand. After releasing dozens of tiny games, Caves is his first big game project. As well as making games, Matthew co-founded a group that exhibits locally made games at festivals, museums and art galleries – the aim is to present game-making as a creative hobby that anyone can get involved with, just like painting or music.
Caves is a 2D mining and exploration game, but with triangles instead of squares. Forced underground by a devastating attack, you must explore a hidden world and build to survive. But these caves are not empty; the more you expand, the more you'll come into conflict with the strange creatures and communities around you.
Tom Francis is the designer, programmer and writer of Heat Signature, which he works on with artist John Roberts and composer John Halpart. He was previously a game critic at PC Gamer, and designed a game called Gunpoint in his spare time while he was there. After Gunpoint came out, he quit his job to become an indie developer full time.
Heat Signature is a top-down space stealth game where you fly up to enemy ships, latch onto their airlock, and sneak inside. Then it becomes like a stealthy Hotline Miami, sneaking past guards or ambushing them, stealing loot, sabotaging ship systems or hijacking the whole ship.
Karen Teixeira (bitmOO) is a Brazilian nomad gamedev, illustrator and toymaker passionate about playfulness and all things whimsical. Having worked for the past years as a 2D/3D Game Artist, Astromantica is her first solo project as she teaches herself programming.
Astromantica is a space opera visual novel with card game battles in which you play as either enemy leaders and former friends in a galactic war. It is a bittersweet tale of reconciliation as your decisions as a leader affect the outcome of war as well as the amending of a broken friendship.
Pol Clarissou and Armel Gibson are long term friends and collaborators, both members of the art collective Klondike and from the north of France. They share the same interest in shortform experimentations puling away from traditional games structures. Patrick Ashe and David Kanaga recently joined the team as part-time collaborators, respectively on production and sound design.
Vignettes is a toyish suprise-o-rama without text nor characters, where an object shapeshifts as the player spins it around. It’s a game designed to delight and surprise players as they discover how they can manipulate the objects, and how their interactions with each other reveal hidden secrets.
Auston and Diana are a couple of creative kids building fun things that deliver the feels. Both Auston and Diana are programmers, designers and artists. They're based in Seattle, Washington, USA.
CatDate is a game where you play as a cat and go on dates with other cats. As you hang out with cats, you'll begin to form deeper relationships with them; it's up to you whether you become best friends or ultimate rivals. CatDate is about learning how to empathize and interact with others on a deeper meaningful level.
Andreas is studying MediaArts at KHM in Cologne (Germany) while working as an AppProgrammer/3D-Artist/Illustrator to keep his Head afloat. He has been drawing and doing animations most of his life and is working with Unity since 2013. Many prototypes and GameJams lead to him programming his own game today.
Spin Up: Small Gymnasts try to fling themselces up a crazy tower. They use everything they can reach to get higher then the others. But the tower throws many dangers at them that need to be avoided, has routes that lead into nothing, is home to many hostile creatures and has so many moving parts that make the gymnasts heads spin. But they were doing that anyway.
Ivan Notaroš comes from Belgrade, Serbia. He does a lot of game experiments, small games and jams. He is always looking out to try as many new things and ideas as possible, and collaborate if he can, but currently he mostly makes games with procedural generation and first person experiences. With a background in architecture and photography, he ventured into game development relatively recently, just 3 years ago. As such, he is a one man team working on both code and art.
House of Flowers is a game about the war without the war. Rather, it is a story about the people that live on the other side of the conflict, living the indirect consequences of it. The economic crisis, the collapse of established systems, the rise of corruption in a society on the brink of the national breakup. It is also a game about what led to the state of things today. It is a non-violent first person, physics based game, that also combines elements of RPG, driving simulation and common sense.
Tanja Tankred and Mira Dorthé from Other Tales make atmospheric and experimental games infused with story. They met each other at a Magic gathering a couple of years back and have made games together ever since.
Tick Tock is a two-player adventure game about two clockmakers who wanted to control time. The game is played on two devices, where the players control a device each. The players have to work together to solve puzzles left by the two clockmakers and discover their story.
Niklas Hallin is a solo developer from Sweden. After a few attempts at forming or joining game making teams he eventually released his first game by himself in 2015. The journey continues from there with the new game project Baby Elephant Walk, which carries on a focus on single-player storytelling.
Baby Elephant Walk is a puzzle adventure game about a little elephant who is tasked to save the world, or at least make it a better place. Using his trunk in various ways, Elephant Yono must explore labyrinths and dungeons, and travel across the kingdom to help humans, robots and undeads alike. But when this huge responsibility starts bearing down on him, will Yono be strong enough to shoulder the fate of a whole world?
Michael Fallik and Laura Yilmaz are co-directors at new indie studio Portmanteau. Michael is a game designer and producer of both mobile and console game projects. Laura is a 2D animator and animation director with six years of experience in commercial, TV, and feature animation. They live in Los Angeles with two ungrateful cats.
Their first title together, Thin Air, thrusts the player into a hostile landscape where air itself is a resource to be managed. Add hallucination-inducing native plantlife into the mix, and you've got yourself a true adventure. Emotions run high amidst the natural dangers and discomfort of the mountainside, but the real challenge lies in navigating the landscape within."
The team consists of three friends from the southern tip of Africa. They prototyped this game when they used to work together. But after old studio dissolved they worried that they'd never get the chance to work on the game again. They were wrong! Robbie and Marc look like they might be vikings, but they're actually game programmers! Dorianne looks like she might be... well actually she just looks exactly like an artist, which she is!
Kingdom in the Sky is a city-builder/management-game about piecing together the scattered fragments of the world in order to build a prosperous new society amongst the clouds. Instead of exploring and building a city in a pre-existing landscape, you dispatch scouts to find new pieces of land which can then be rotated and fused together in order to form an ever expanding floating kingdom.
The team consists of Julie, Nicolas and Xavier, three game design graduates from Switzerland. Their game Castle Hustle was born as a semester project, where they focused 12 weeks on building a multiplayer game. Even though everyone of them has their own specialty, they are trained as game design generalists. This means that they often share work responsibilities amongst each other, since everyone has an understanding of each other's work.
Julie is our artist. She has a talent for creating awesome characters and bringing them to life through animation.
Nicolas’ passion is sound. Most of his games have a focus on mechanics that make use of original music in some way.
Xavier likes to bury himself under lines of code. He gets excited about all things Unity and likes to experiment with game mechanics
Castle Hustle is a local, turn-based multiplayer game in which you and your friends defend the king’s castle against magical creatures. Instead of playing against each other, this game is all about surviving as a team! Talk with each other to plan your actions ahead and make sure your groups is in perfect sync. The unique aspect of Castle Hustle is that it uses the technology provided by AirConsole, a browser gaming platform that turns the player’s smartphone into a gamepad.B
