Spell of Play Studios
Okidedokie maybe it does not come as a surprise that I have finally killed the web for Spell of Play Studios. There was basically no activity the last few years and while not expensive the costs do accumulate. The domain redirects to this log so it seems suitable to write some kind of retrospective. Idk how long this will be and maybe I will just continue adding onto it as I remember things.
Basically it started when I left Massive Entertainment (now UBI Soft Massive) to instead work with robitics simulation. At this point in time the it was crashing hard and the dot-com boom was definitely over working with robots was basically game programming but with better pay, conditions and job security. I also had personal reasons for not wanting to live in Malmö and well long story short I had to give up the dream of working with games as a programmer. The dream however lived on and we where a small crew that basically left Massive at the same time, keeping in touch we started a little collective called Digital Friends. We build our own little online community and showed different projects and stuff. During this time I was mosly into game/graphis engine programming and I did a lot of OpenGL stuff. We did have some physical meetings during this time also. Fun stuff!
Eventually this escalated when I and a colleague decided to start a game development business. Our idea was basically to create casual games and go the indie route. We did this the hard way and created games in C++ for PC :P inspired by studios like Pop Cap Games, and Reflexive Games. Our first title was Time Breaker an arcanoid clone. Was an interesting project with some innovative parts regarding the 3d/2d playing field. As a game it was rather corny with some kind of wierd factoid presented before each level, idk why we did that… It was published by Alawar Entertainment and you can probably find it somewhere out there :P
While not being a huge sucess we did feel that this was a major achievement: actually finishing a game, publishing and getting some money (albeit not nearly enough to live on…) We then tried some other ideas and also to expand the team a bit, one idea I remember was an underwater themed exploration/rougelike called Aquanauts. Our bigger ideas tended to not be that fruitful and we basically went back to the small scale and worked on a puzzle game called Carribean Pirate Quest that got published by Big Fish Games, and an arcade bullet hell shooter called [T.W.T.P.B.]{(https://youtu.be/kYd5XrN3GiU?feature=shared) T.W.T.P.B. was my own pet project and I worked on this for basically two years. This was self published (and part of some Polish computer magazine “Computer Swiat”).
One of the basic tenants of SoP was to release titles early and during development to our “community”. Basically the first versions were maybe just a window that opened with a title screen on it. We even build our own distribution application called hUb based on subversion to manage this.
All in all I was probably more interested in development than running a game studio, so for the last few years (like 10-15) nothing has actually happened. The company has officially not existed for a long time but I have kept the web up and running. But all good things need to end, and now it was time for Spell of Play Studios to end. Maybe it will live again…
This was a very short retrospective, maybe I will add to it when time and memory permits.
tags: programming - games - game - dev - development - entrepeneur - indie
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