Steamy Potatoes’ tactical story-based experience
“Once upon a time, in the spring just before the great pandemic of 2020 hit hard, there were 2 game development teams competing against each other. The other team had 5 members and the other only one, but they all knew each other from school and were rooting for each other. Right after the competition they all got to know each other better over drinks. They heard rumors of an amazing opportunity called Boost Startup Journey. They were all interested about it but both teams had their struggles and applying looked impossible. Until both teams realized that these problems could be solved by uniting their forces. So that’s what they did.“
The game development company Steamy Potatoes first formed in May 2020 with its current line-up. All the members are students in Turku University of Applied Sciences, where all of them are starting their third year in the game development track. Filipe is the CEO of the group, he’s a bit of an all- rounder, knows how to program, 3d model, make music and so on. He’s originally from Portugal and is eager to learn Finnish. Hoa, the funny uncle of the team, ultimately aims to be an all-rounder as well, but is currently focused on texturing and 2D art. Another 2D artist is Amy, who does monster and UI design for the game and handles the marketing. She’s also good at organizing and thus ends up reminding the rest of the team about all the deadlines. Then on 3D art we have Mika, who also dabbles in texturing. But really, he’s a meme master. Helena does character and monster 3D models and handles the narrative design. She also supplies the other potatoes with their daily sugar rush through cookies. And the sixth member in the group is Alarik who handles the programming side of things and enables Mika’s memes.
Together we aspire to create games with great, thought-provoking stories and engaging gameplay. As a company we value honesty, responsibility and ambitiousness which we strive to bring forth in our games. An example of this will be the game we are currently working on: Altera. Altera is a story driven 3D tactical turn-based game set within a post-apocalyptic steampunk world. The story revolves around three main characters and the theme of the game being survival, friendship and morals. We came up with the idea for Altera when we saw that Alarik had already created a promising looking prototype for a tactical turn-based game. From there we looked through some other similar games, throwing ideas around, before we finally settled on the current look for the game. We were inspired by great games such as Monster Hunter, X-COM and Persona.
We will soon release a combat demo for our friends, family and the community to test. We hope to use this demo to get feedback on our core mechanics to further improve the gaming experience on the road towards the final product. If you are interested in joining our journey, you can join the hunt on Discord.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story!
Sincerely, Steamy Potatoes
Written by Amy Nutchanart