Ex-XCOM creative director founds life sim maker Midsummer
After Jake Solomon left Firaxis Studios last year, the former creative director on the XCOM series could probably have found any number of publishers or venture capitalists to back a new turn-based strategy studio. It would have a sure thing, a lay-up, like a point blank shot with a 98% to-hit rate.
Which, as any XCOM players who missed one too many of those shots will know, might help explain why he didn't do that.
Instead, Solomon turned up the fundraising difficulty, passing the hat as the industry began a post-pandemic bubble slump that continues to this day, and doing it to fund a project in a genre he had never worked: the modern life sim.
"We were lucky though," Solomon tells GamesIndustry.biz in a chat at this year's Game Developers Conference. "We did raise a seed round and Transcend was the lead investor. So we raised a $6 million round, and we used that to open a new studio in Hunt Valley, where I've worked my entire career."
The new start-up, Midsummer Studios, was co-founded last September with ex-Firaxis lead designer Will Miller and financial and operations management veteran Nelsie Birch, and officially announced today. And while Solomon concedes the life sim genre doesn't sound very much in-line with his past work, he believes there's more overlap than people might expect with his previous games, in particular the combat in XCOM.
"The combination of custom or generated characters that the player creates and then a playspace where the player's choices feel meaningful and you can be rewarded or have consequences as a result… The way to make that work, where the player feels like they're riding a story that's authentic and uniquely theirs is you have to have a fair number of systems driving both reward for the player, giving them objectives and things to do, but at the same time having consequence," Solomon says.
"So the setting changes, and you say, 'Okay, that's fine. If this is modern life and it's non-violent, can we still use those tools?' And now that
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