STUGAN 2018
25th June - 11th August
Teams at Stugan 2018:
Team 1: Christopher Smith & Year In The Trees
Team 2: Dominic and Tom & Silt
Team 3: Sara Lempiäinen & Trollskogen
Team 4: Bartosz Kamiński & Mothership
Team 5: Marishka Zachariah & SoothSayer
Team 6: Isabel and Jasper & SHIRO
Team 7: Candice and Emily & Grimoire
Team 8: Mark Benner & Space Game (WIP)
Team 9: Wick Perry & Crescent Loom
Team 10: Manny Quansah & Oshrai's Quest
Team 11: Dan Schumacher & Brimshire GM
Team 12: Aleksandra, Selina and Martina & Letters
Team 13: Adam Robinson-Yu & Untitled Paper RPG
Team 14: Philip Buchanan & WIP
Team 15: Wren and Tim & Unpacking
Trailer of the projects that are going to be at Stugan 2018:
Lunoland is the imprint of Chicago-based indie developer Christopher Smith. Primarily known as a multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer who performs under the moniker Luno, he loves working on various creative projects that span music, code, art, digital video, and design.
Year In The Trees is a pixel art survival RPG about beginning a new life in an enchanted forest filled with secrets. The game features a blend of hand-authored and procedural content so that it feels familiar each time you return, but random enough that no two character's stories are ever the same. Farm, fish, forage, and fight deep into the heart of nature. Learn to survive on your own while unearthing the forgotten history of the forest.
Tom Mead (art, visual design) is a freelance illustrator. His work has been feature in galleries worldwide including the V&A Museum and the RWA Academy. Clients include Aardman Animations, Workman Publishing, Revolution Game, Oxford University Press and The British Council of India. Accolades include a Global Design Masters “Master” award, Bristol 24/7 Magazine’s Artist of the month (Oct 2016), BBC Trending 2016 drawing livestream (>20k views). He was a layout designer for the game “Broken Sword: A Serpent’s Curse” and the illustrator for the book “The Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods”.
Dominic Clarke (programming, game design) is a scientist and lead programmer for the sensory biophysics research group at the University of Bristol. He has published work in several top-tier scientific journals (e.g. Science, PNAS) and it has been covered internationally by the scientific press including New Scientist, Nature, BBC Nature, NPR, The Guardian and more. It has been featured on television programs including David Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities (Eden channel) and Hive Alive (BBC documentary). He has developed software for a wide range of academic projects and brings extensive knowledge of physics and animal behaviour simulation.
Silt is a 2D underwater exploration game. Players will explore a large, dark and foreboding ocean landscape, from the sunlit shallows to the darkest depths of the ocean trenches. The world is inhabited by a diverse range of ocean life, from docile herbivores to aggressive predators and carnivorous plants. It is littered with ancient machinery and the remains of the divers that came before. Driven by systemic AI, animals shoal together, hunt, forage and flee dynamically. Players will maintain their oxygen, stamina, electrical power and health by finding items in the world. Some items reward players with increased capacity, allowing entry to deeper, more dangerous waters. Throughout the game players will encounter enormous goliaths - ancient and colossal guardians of the land. The player must overcome these creatures to gain unique abilities and influence over the other animals, and gain access to the deepest areas of the ocean.
Sara is an artist and programmer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She creates interactive fairy tales influenced by Nordic folklore that are heavy on the visuals and can appeal to a non-traditional gamers audience.
Trollskogen is a calm exploration through the Nordic woods where you encounter mystical creatures such as trolls and 'vittror', as well as friendly animals such as deers and foxes. You interact with the environment by performing actions such as moving the stars or rotating the moon in order to solve small puzzles and find hidden objects. The game also incorporates tilt and rotation of the device to make it more playful and intuitive to interact with the world.
Bartosz Kamiński was born and raised in Poland. Graduate of Sound design collage. All his life working on the edge of art and technology with music, video and life acts. Finally became a game developer. Proud member of Unreal Engine Community. Sport freak. Humanist. Foodie. Social animal.
Mothership is a 2D mobile game with old school vector style graphics. You fly your ship through space collecting minerals and avoiding meteors. On every trip you burn fuel and you have to go back to Mothership to refill. On Mothership you can also trade your minerals and with money you earn you can improve your spaceship to fly further, faster and collect more minerals.
Marishka Zachariah is a game developer, designer and digital artist who partakes in many other projects involving VR, AR, UI/UX and narrative design, and has an immense passion for indie games and accompanying alternative controllers that bring strong and unique narratives, art styles and game mechanics. They are heavily involved in Toronto’s indie game community, participating in Hand Eye Society’s Artist in Residency, Toronto Comics Arts Festival: Comics x Games, mentoring workshops at Dames Making Games and exhibiting work Gamma Space and other galleries across Toronto. Marishka believes making games is intrinsic to their life, and shares this belief by teaching videogames and open-sourced hardware and software to peers of all ages. Besides working on personal games, they are currently working as a VR developer for the National Film Board of Canada and as a mobile game designer at Upptack Studios.
SoothSayer: You are at a party with unfamiliar faces, and feeling the customary anxiety kick in. After taking a drug from your host you end up floating in the neverwhere, with the ability to traverse the bodies and minds of people and creatures alike at the party, trying to solve a way to leave the party as you travel inside the minds and bodies of partygoers for clues. Inspired by the level design in Ocarina of Time and the puzzle mechanics of The Witness, Soothsayer is a roomscale VR game that focuses on exploring platforming and puzzle solving within a VR space, as well as overarching themes involving mental health, self care and exploring deeper emotions within us, focusing on addressing the mental health we overlook that becomes heightened in social settings and interactions.
Topicbird is a two-humans-one-spider studio based in Kassel, Germany. Together, Jasper Meiners and Isabel Paehr make playful art, a mess and meshes, games, unexecutable or unexcusable code.
SHIRO is a mobile game that celebrates the beauty of Japanese lacquerware 漆器.
Think out of the box while playing on a lacquer box: Beneath smooth surfaces, stories of depth await those who unriddle complex geometries. SHIRO consists of three parts: KURO (black), MIDORI (green) and AKA (red). Journey towards calmness while rotating the box, puzzle by puzzle, word by word, further in time.
Candice & Emily are two friends from Melbourne, Australia working on a Visual Novel called GRIMOIRE, inspired by modern day Witchcraft, and Paganism. Candice excels at beautiful digital paintings, bringing characters and scenes to life. Emily helps organise the many aspects of making GRIMOIRE, including the design, narrative and production. Candice and Emily are working on the story of the game and its cast of characters together.
Hey my name is Mark Benner - aka Goldfish. Things I'm all about: GAMES, Science, Podcasts, Anime, TV Shows. My life right now is very focused around game development and paying bills. (unfortunately separate things right now)
I'm working on a pixel art strategy game set in space (aptly named Space Game (until I think of a real one)) The player will find themselves crash landed in an unknown sector of space and have to build / manage / defend their colony. I plan to add roguelike and meta-game elements so that the enemies you face change each game and research and discoveries you make can carry over in to your next game.
Wick Perry is trained as a neurobiologist and self-taught as a independent game developer, juggling the programming, art, design, and business of game dev. He has successfully run and fulfilled two Kickstarter campaigns since 2012 — including the one for his present project, Crescent Loom. Wick's career goal is to create games based in science that are absolutely played for their own merits. Not all subjects translate into compelling games, so Wick aims to find topics that synergize well with commercially-viable gameplay loops. He describes his process as game design that pulls inspiration from nature, rather than trying to shoe-horn curriculum points into the form of a game.
Crescent Loom is an underwater creature-building game where you create the bodies and brains of an animal to navigate an alien ocean. Stitch a lifeform out of bones, joints, and muscles and then bring it to life by weaving neurons into a simple brain. Participate in an online ecosystem by participating in races and navigational challenges; if your creation does well, it will be used to populate the worlds of other players! Through natural mechanical exploration, Crescent Loom aims to finally make the unique language of neuroscience accessible to everyone.
Didn't join Stugan due to visa restriction.
Manny is a guy who likes to connect people through art be it videogames or paintings. Manny loves haikus, watercolor paintings (he paints in this medium) and going for long walks! He is a cool and lovable guy who sometimes tries to make people laugh and is shy at first but then become cool after knowing someone for sometime. For some years now he is trying to raise awareness of video game development in his country and believes Stugan can help him achieve his dream.
Oshrai's Quest is a 2D platformer about a guy who gets sent by the Universe to restore colour. It is a game about life and focuses on some stages of life such as inception, making friends, meeting other people in life and even death. Along the way Oshrai meets and befriends some characters who help him on his quest to restore colour and other NPC who represent certain people in everyone's life.
Dan Schumacher is an indie game developer currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts. He has a degree in Recreation, Sport, and Tourism from the University of Illinois and hopes to use the skills he’s learned as a developer to create sports that take full advantage of video games as a medium. He spends most of his time developing educational games for clients, participating in game jams, and balling out.
Brimshire League Manager is a sport management game where the player takes on the role of a manager overseeing a roster of diverse creature athletes with their own individual stats and abilities. Brimshire is a kingdom where counties vie for political power through sports. After each season, the managers from each team vote to change the structure of the league as well as the rules of the matches and thus players will observe and influence the evolution of a sport.
We are three friends from Switzerland who met during our game design studies at the Zurich University of the Arts. Last year, we formed 5am Games and started to develop a game called Letters – a written adventure. Since then, we have exhibited the game all around Switzerland and won a development grant by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Aleksandra Iakusheva is our programmer and the one who came up with the original game-idea. Selina Capol creates all visuals and animations and Martina Hotz is responsible for the level design and writing.
Letters – a written adventure is a single-player puzzle adventure about the life of Sarah, told through the letters she sends to her pen pal.
The letters themselves form the game world the players navigate through. On their way, they will encounter numerous drawings, blocking the way.To get past them, players can pick up and change words from the text by removing single letters and use these newly created words to interact with the game world.
Choosing the right words can be tricky. Talking to the drawings and reading between the lines will be necessary to find the correct solution.
Since Letters is multilinear, players have to make decisions throughout the game that will change the course of the story.
Sponsored by:
Adam is a game developer from Toronto, Canada. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 2015 with a degree in Computer Science. He was a programmer and level designer on Pitfall Planet, which was nominated for Best Student Game at the 2016 IGF Awards. After releasing Pitfall Planet that year, he spent some time working in the software industry, and now he's returning to game development. He's been making games ever since he's gotten his hands on the tools to do so, and he'd love to be able to turn his passion into a career.
Untitled paper RPG: Adam is currently working on a paper-cut-out styled adventure RPG. The game is inspired by his favourite RPGs from his childhood, where turn-based combat is enhanced with simple rhythm challenges. The overworld portion of the game will feature light platforming, exploration, and puzzle elements. When possible, he likes to build the environments in his game after places he's been in real life. The game will follow the adventures of a crocodile who's moved to a new city.
Philip Buchanan is a kiwi game developer. With a background in engineering, he made the jump to games - after years of study in image processing - because he's passionate about computer graphics, visual design and implicit storytelling. Philip previously worked for Square Enix Montreal on titles including Lara Croft GO and Deus Ex GO before leaving to work on his own projects. After the successful launch of his co-operative adventure game 39 Days to Mars, he's now starting work on the next game.
This un-named game is an idle, society, builder-esque game that's about trying to steer the development and progress of a road-side knitted sock stand into the foundation for your political, religious, commercial (or otherwise) empire. The game moves inexorably forward, and along with balancing your resources, your main role is to meddle in the way things develop around you.
Wren Brier is a game artist specializing in pixel art, UI design and illustration. After spending several years at Halfbrick predominantly working on Jetpack Joyride, Wren became a freelancer with indie aspirations. Wren is creating the pixel art visuals for the game and leading the game design.
Tim Dawson is a multi-disciplined game dev who has worked as a 3D animator at larger studios including Midway, Team Bondi, Electronic Arts and Sega before going rogue. As an indie dev, Tim co-created Assault Android Cactus, currently released on PC, PS4 and XBox One. Tim is handling the coding and anything else that needs to get done.
Tim and Wren first met at a local game dev meet-up, started dating during a Melbourne International Games Week, and moved in together this February — inspiring this game.
Unpacking is a zen puzzle game about pulling possessions out of boxes and finding ways to fit them into a new living space. While there's a challenge to fitting everything in just right, it's also a game of self expression and making connections between a place and the items that fill it. The narrative follows a woman through the moves in her life. This story is communicated indirectly through dates, locations and the items the main character has brought with her into each new home. The gameplay is slow and contemplative, encouraging the player to experience a sense of intimacy with a character they never see and a story they're never told.
