So, here we finally are! The launch of our game company and our first post as a studio! It’s probably best if I start by introducing myself. My name is Paul Siner, I am the co-founder of WorldAway Studio where I also act as primary level designer, Story director and anything else that might need doing in a two person team. I will also be serving as the writer for our first post. I thought I’d take this time to talk about the studio launch, the values that we would like to instill and why two people from literally the other side of the world (I’m from the UK and Evan is from Australia) have decided to take on this venture together. I will also briefly talk about the new projects that we currently have in development, and our future plans. So let’s get started!

The Studio launch

It’s been a very exciting day for us (and a busy week leading up to it) as we announce not only the new studio but also share more about the projects that we currently have in development. This whole venture started out with two guys who had a passion for making games. Myself and Evan have been around similar development circles for a while now but we never really started talking until we met in a discord group for the little known game engine Easy FPS Editor (which is a great little engine i might add) we both discussed our interests, shared information on the solo projects we were working on and helped each other with any development struggles along the way. Then one day, Evan messaged me with a question “Hey, why don’t we make our own studio together?” It was not really something I had ever considered, game development for me, is a hobby and one that I had (mostly) done alone up to this point. It was an exciting idea to collaborate with someone else, share ideas and bring a vision for a project together. So I replied, almost instantly with “YES!”.

As a gigantic studio of two we know fully our limitations in terms of scopes of games that we can create, especially within a reasonable development cycle. This is why we have made it our goal to show just what a small studio can create together. We aim to try and show people that you don’t need a massive financial backing or an army of people in order to create something that’s unique, compelling and well polished. Our aim, in essence, is to try to inspire people to create their own games with their own ideas and stories, to be able to express themselves through the games they made, just like me and Evan had been inspired to create ours. 

Finding Gulliver

We both loved adventure movies like Indiana Jones as well as games like Tomb Raider and realised that this was a perfect combination to try and bring to life in our project. A game that infused action with puzzle solving elements located in exotic and world spanning locations. It evoked a sense of the grand adventure but was also achievable for a small team to complete if the scope was tight enough. 
One of the problems faced by any developer when creating a new IP (intellectual property) is trying to sell it to the audience, and it is, for many, an uphill battle. You have to sell people on the characters, the world, the gameplay, the story, and many other aspects of a project. To try and give ourselves a slightly less uphill climb we decided to base our protagonist on an existing property, one in the public domain. Not only would this character potentially be familiar to people but it also gave ourselves a nice base level that we could build our story and world around. After deliberation we decided on basing our world and story around the novel ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. To give ourselves a little bit more leeway to be creative we decided the protagonist was going to be a descendant of the novel’s narrator Lemuel Gulliver. This descendant has spent his life admiring his ancestor and trying to recreate his adventures by having some of his own. This allows us to have more creative freedom for storytelling but also gives a rich backstory to the protagonist by having him related to a ‘legendary’ figure.

We also thought about the best way to introduce the character and the world to the players. Do we put all of our resources into one huge game? Or introduce the characters and story in smaller projects? We decided that the latter was the best course of action for two reasons. It gives us the ability to hone our skills as game developers and it also gives us space to really flesh out the story, we aren’t constrained to trying to cram an entire story into one experience we can let each character and story beat breathe in its own standalone adventure.

The graphic below shows a tentative timeline of the projects we have in various stages of production currently and gives you an idea of what you can expect from our studio. The first three projects will be shorter experiences in the classic 2.5D style with action and puzzle-solving elements. They will be designed in order to introduce the player to the characters and world of Gulliver. We also wanted to do something more casual with the character so we have a unique twist on the endless runner genre planned later down the line. This will be available on both PC and mobile and will give the player a more casual, ‘drop-in, drop-out’ experience. This all culminates to a larger and more grandiose project that will act as the flagship title in the series and will act as the pinnacle of everything we had done previously.

While we are still pretty early in the planning stages of our projects we thought we would share some early information via the graphic below on the first chapter that will be released in early 2025. We will be sharing further information soon such as story details and a solid release date.

Thank you all for reading and we hope that you join us on our journey. 

Paul Siner
Co-founder