have been the result of a few too many drinks.
‘‘As I remember, we were incredibly hungover
when the game jam started, and thought it
would be fun to make a local multiplayer game,”
Sommer tells us. “After that, we just bounced
some ideas around, and ended up with a
whiteboard of keywords about Sweden, athletes
from the seventies, and dodgeball. I think it
helped that people were too tired to care if this
was actually a really good idea.”
Thankfully, it was, as the vibrant and colourful
game won him and his team a prize for ‘Most Fun’
game of that year. It’s a project Game Swing have
been working on ever since.
After Nordic Game Jam, the team entered
Stikbold! in as many showcases and conferences
as they could. They also continued in a similar
vein to the jam work ethic, focusing on the
project in intense and small periods of time. In
hindsight, Sommer suggests, this might not have
been the tidiest approach. “Every showcase gave
a boost to the morale as we experienced real
players’ reaction to the latest progress, and we
would return to the office afterwards with new
inspiration based on the feedback,” he recalls.
“The negative side effect of this approach was
that we rarely had time to pause progress to
clean up the project and rework things in a more
sustainable way.”
When Stikbold! launched in 2016, three years
after its time in-jam, the response from players
was positive, but for Sommer, the real feeling
of success came from seeing the growth of
his team. “Today, we have an extremely strong
foundation and are about to take the company
to a new stage with other challenges,” he says.
“We’ve been through a lot to make it this far,
and there’s an enormous trust within the team
because we know each other so well, both
personally and professionally. Running a game
development startup can be extremely taxing at
times, but it seems like we’re heading in the right
direction, so it feels really cool to think, ‘We’re
doing it, and we’re doing it our way.’”
ROAD TO REBELLION
The two founders of Space Backyard studio
know all about the desire to do things their own
way. When Alessandro Arcidiacono and Simone
Tranchina met, they were already working
together at a large games company, but it wasn’t
the environment either of them hoped for.
“We felt trapped, crushed by a mechanism that
Stikbold! fulfilled Game Swing’s
ambition to make a multiplayer
game – up to eleven people can
be connected at once.left us no room for manoeuvre,” they tell us via
email. “We were lucky enough to be surrounded
by many talented people, but in time, they all
left for places where their skills were put to
better use. This is why we felt the urge to change
direction, start believing in our own vision and
capabilities, and set sail to new adventures.”
Entering the Watermelon Game Jam in 2016
was the first step in their new career. The game
they created, The Story of the Revolutionary
Watermelon, asked the player to slap a real
watermelon – the aim being to help the fruit on
the screen escape a farm (if you want to build
your own watermelon controller, by the way,
instructions can be found at wfmag.cc/melons).
Revolutionary Watermelon is, Space Backyard
say, pretty symbolic of the studio’s real-
life journey. “It was a barbaric cry against
the industry,” they write, “and our first act
of freedom.”
The game was picked up for exhibit at the
indie game festival, Game Happens. It was here
that Space Backyard met festival coordinatorGREAT DANE
Taking place each year in
Copenhagen, Nordic Game
Jam is by far one of the largest
physical game jams in the
world. It takes place over 48
hours, and sees around 500
developers in attendance.
In 2018, developers from 31
different nations took part.GREAT DANE
46 / wfmag.cc
It started with a game jamInterface