This one was one of my bigger challenges because it involved the founding of a startup company. We started Chap the Turtle as a small team of three guys sitting in a student shared flat’s kitchen. After sharing our first ideas we ended up spending about three month to reiterate our concept and trailer. Jan Wagner from Cliffhanger Productions did consulting  for the project and supported us by pitching the project to several potential publishers. At some point we got signed by SCEE (Sony Europe) and that was the start of “Monkeyhead Studio” back in 2008. Here is our pitch trailer.

The game was basically a physic based 3D jump and run including some sort of “Tony Hawk” alike rolling around and making stunts mechanics. The artstyle was obviously initially influenced by little big planet, mixed with street art and art toy elements. For Chap the Turtle I did the basic game design, early prototypes with Virtools and some work on the pitch trailer during the initial phase while my co-founder was in charge of the art direction.

As the project became a startup company I was CEO of the endeavour which included hiring staff, negotiating contracts, team management and even beeing the project manager, internal producer and still main game designer. Man I had way too many hat’s on my head during that time and it was pretty stressful but I really learned a ton. All so we managed to put a really nice team of ten people together over the two years the company ran. Sadly at the end we had to close doors in 2010 and go separate ways individually heading towards new adventures. This second video shows some footage we captured from the PS3 about a year into development. Chap the turtle was produced using Sony’s gameengine provided to 3rd party developers.