Maddalena Grattarola, who would later join the
team as writer, alongside programmer Gianluca
Pandolfo. The Watermelon Game Jam worked its
magic, and by the time the team entered its next
jam, the studio comprised four members that are
still together today.
“In founding the studio,” they say, “we were
driven by an uncontrollable desire for freedom,
and yes, as of today, it still smells of freedom:
it’s the secret ingredient we can no longer do
without, the engine that keeps us going, and
the only true source of sincere inspiration. Our
games, like those of many other indies, couldn’t
possibly be born in any other place than the small
studio in which they were made.”
ALWAYS BE JAMMING
Four years on, and game jams have continued to
play a part in Space Backyard’s story. The studio’s
Bird of Passage is focused on
the Great Kantō earthquake,
which shook Japan in 1923. You’ll
also uncover some botanical
facts about the ginkgo tree. Game jams invite all sorts of weird ideas – like using a
watermelon as a controller, as seen in The Story of
the Revolutionary Watermelon. Since its release, Like Roots in the Soil has travelled
to several European festivals, and even appeared at
the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, where you can play it
with a custom controller.SPACE JAM
The four members of Space
Backyard are scattered around
the globe, with the members
at the present moment living
in Genoa, Tokyo, Weimar, and
London. Despite this distance,
“what keeps [them] united is
having interests and abilities
that complement and support
each other, while sharing the
same values.”SPACE JAM
AS^ I REMEMBER, WE WERE
INCREDIBLY HUNGOVERWHEN^ THE^ GAME JAM STARTED
most recent game was Like Roots in the Soil,
their 2017 submission to Post-Apocalyptic Jam,
which was nominated for A MAZE. in Berlin and
exhibited at EGX’s Leftfield Collection in London
in 2018. It’s easy to see what the fuss is about:
short and poetic, Like Roots in the Soil casts you
as two characters, an old man and a young man,
walking down the same street in two different
conditions – one damaged and one whole.
Moving around your controller allows you to
explore the split-screen points of view so you can
compare side-by-side views of the young man’s
modern town and the old man’s crumbling city,
while text at the bottom narrates your journey. It
was the jam environment, the studio writes, that
gave rise to such a simple, beautiful tale: “When
you have little to no time, and no budget, you
tend to work frugally, to economise. And this, to
us, means to look for the most simple or essential
solution, which often turns out being also the
most elegant and sincere.’’
Just like Sommer and his team, Space Backyard
have retained this way of working even out of
jams. One of their most recent projects, Bird of
Passage – their first creation outside a jam – had
them working in a very similar fashion. The studio
tells us: “The approach to making Bird of Passage
was similar to that experienced during a jam: we
self-imposed a short deadline and developed
the game in less than a month, working remotely
and part-time... we may say that this ‘jam-like’
method allows us to remain super-focused on
the essential elements of the game, forcing us
to constantly question what is superfluous. In
the end, the final result represents the most
sincere and direct take we could provide on the
chosen subject.”
Bird of Passage brings together everything
the studio is best at, from its poetic writing style
to the clean aesthetic. It explores Tokyo, telling
the story of a passenger and the taxi drivers
they encounter. While the game showcases the
studio’s strengths, it’s also a culmination of what
the quartet is continually striving toward, Space
Backyard say. “As a studio, our main goal is to
maintain our identity and to bring the sameIt started with a game jamInterface
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