Posted by Jonas Wæver, Creative Director
Weird name, right? Well, to be honest that’s kind of the point. I chose that name because it doesn’t remind me of any other game studio. It sounds cozy, it sounds mysterious, and most importantly, it has alliteration. You’d be surprised how far alliteration will get you.
Our company has existed for a grand total of about 3 months now – and yet we already feel like a well established and tightly knit team. When THQ Nordic approached me to ask if I wanted to start a new studio in Copenhagen to keep making RPGs for them, first of all I couldn’t believe my luck, but apart from that I immediately started poking my friends in the industry to hear if they’d be interested in helping out.
My name and position on the team is already rather presumptuously plastered onto the front page, so let’s talk about the rest of the management team instead. Nils Iver Holtar is our Technical Director – he was formerly the lead AI programmer at IO Interactive, and before then we worked together on Expeditions: Viking. He’s one of the best programmers I know, but I chose him just as much because he’s great with people and knows how to manage programmers (very similar to herding cats).
For Art Director I tagged Caroline Fangel, fresh off releasing the extremely well-reviewed indie adventure Gerda: A Flame in Winter. Caroline will be adding a fresh perspective since she’s one of the few people on the team who hasn’t worked on an Expeditions game before, but her fantastic work on Gerda means she’s well familiar with the challenges of making top-down games look good. Finally (but certainly not least) our Narrative Director is Dr. Fasih Sayin, Crytek alumnus and former Head of Narrative Design on Hunt: Showdown – after working together on Expeditions: Rome, where he was Lead Narrative Designer, I knew I never wanted to make another RPG without him.
The Team
At the time of writing this, we are 12 seasoned game developers of which 7 work out of a temporary office in Copenhagen, and 5 are working remotely from Turkey, Romania, or just elsewhere in Denmark. Not a small team for having only been around for such a short time.
We have come together around a simple purpose: to make exactly the sort of narrative-driven roleplaying games that we enjoy playing. The plan is to grow to a little more than 20 people by the beginning of 2023. I want this team to feel close and well-connected; to have the kind of studio where everyone talks to each other at least weekly, and which never feels like a huge, faceless corporation.
I wish I could talk about what we’re working on right now because it’s so exciting, but unfortunately we are not yet ready to reveal that. Just rest assured it’ll be a roleplaying game, it’ll be narrative-first in every respect, and there’ll be cats in it. It won’t be about cats, to be clear – but cats will be part of it. Because cats make everything better.
