Summerfall Studios on life after Stray Gods
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.
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