Hey Everyone,
It’s long been a dream of mine to start a game studio, and thanks to the positivity, kindness, and encouragement I received since the release of Ex Vitro, I decided to go ahead and do it! The company is called Evolver Dynamics, and I hope it lets me bring better games to you faster.
I set up a company page on Steam right here.
I thought I would use this update to explain what my philosophy is behind the new company and what I hope to achieve with it.
Ever since I was a kid, dating all the way back to the NES era, I’ve been dreaming of making games. I’ve always played lots of different genres, but obviously the Metroidvania genre - and Super Metroid in particular - was the genre that really stuck with me. To this day, I'm still not sure if there's game quite like Super Metroid: the atmosphere, the mystery, the freedom, and the fact that the world felt alive. I truly felt like an intruder into a world that would continue on after I left it (ignore the game's ending, however!).
Trying to recapture some of those feelings is part of what inspired Ex Vitro, but some of the journal entries in the game hint at my other interests too: symbiosis, ecology, and evolution (and what happens when these things go ‘wrong’ or become 'unnatural'). I feel that there’s a cool opportunity to bring some really fascinating biological concepts from the natural world into games. And not just as narrative hooks, but also potentially as game mechanics too.
I think games are amazing tools for teaching people about concepts that are otherwise inaccessible or difficult to understand. While I don’t necessarily want to become a strictly educational game developer, I feel like it’s possible to strike a balance between something that’s fun to play and something that’s generally interesting to learn about at the same time. I’m really inspired by games that immerse you in a world and let you learn by osmosis, or that can spark a new interest in a subject. As an example, I've absorbed and become really interested in Greek mythology thanks to games like Hades and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Along those lines, while I'm continuing to work on Ex Vitro's next update, I’m also currently in the process of bringing one of my casual arcade games to Steam. I think it can serve as a sort of proof of concept for what I envision the company doing, despite being quite different in style and genre than Ex Vitro. It's called 'Mycocosm', and that game's storefront will be online in the next few days.
I don’t imagine there’s much overlap between fans of sci-fi Metroidvanias and casual arcade plant simulators, but if you’re interested in checking it out or helping me make it better, I'll be opening it up for beta testing soon!
Anyways, thanks for reading and to everyone who played Ex Vitro!
Alex