An open beta test for open-world survival crafting game Omega Crafter is now available for PC via Steam until December 17, developer Preferred Networks announced.
Summerfall Studios on life after Stray Gods
14.11.2023 - 00:47 / gamesindustry.biz / David Gaider
Cult of the Lamb, Unpacking, Heavenly Bodies, The Artful Escape, Moving Out, Untitled Goose Game, Hollow Knight. Standout indie games made in Australia have been abundant in the past few years. And Stray Gods is very much following in these footsteps this year.
The role-playing musical made in Melbourne won Game of the Year at this year's Australian Game Developer Awards, in addition to Excellence in Accessibility and Excellence in Music, and has been a critical success since its release in August.
Stray Gods is the creation of Summerfall Studios, a developer co-created by managing director Liam Esler, creative director David Gaider, and executive producer Elie Young. We talked to the team when the studio came out of stealth in 2019 and, at the time, "differerientation" was the key word used by Esler to describe the character-driven project the studio wanted to make (known back then as Chorus: An Adventure Musical).
With its cast of VO superstars and a unique blend of genres, it's fair to say that Stray Gods has fulfilled its brief.
"One of the comments we had was how true Stray Gods is to the very original vision that we had for it, even very early on," Esler tells us when we meet during Melbourne International Games Week. "Not story-wise, but the vision for it. So that's weird and nice."
Gaider agrees that, while the implementation changed a lot, the initial vision for what the team "wanted to evoke, the feel of it, how it would function in its essence" is very faithful to what they wanted to make. This contributed to making the AGDA wins all the more meaningful.
"I think winning even just one award was special enough, let alone three… [But] the coveted Game of the Year? That was really special," Young says.
For Esler, the feeling was a particularly odd and cherished one; a veteran of the Australian games industry, which he's been a core part of since 2011, he used to run GCAP and the AGDAs.
"It was a weird full circle moment and sort of, you know, the Melbourne and Australian games community really helped [buzz] Summerfall in many ways and we've taken so many pieces of knowledge and advice from everyone here," he says.
"And it's a bit cliche but there's something about being acknowledged by peers that you respect. It was really special, just the sheer amount of people who have come up to us to congratulate us and say, like, 'I remember when you were first pitching.' It was a real reminder of like, yes, Summerfall did this thing, but Summerfall is a product of the environment that created it. And that's cool."
For Gaider, best known for being a Beamdog and BioWare veteran, and lead writer behind beloved characters in the Dragon Age IP, this crowned a particularly difficult few years to
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