April 29, 2022
Three Questions to: Unechte Sachen
Unechte Sachen are a young team that met while studying in Darmstadt. Now they are in Hamburg working hard on their VR project "Puppet Play", in which you can create your own little movies and let your imagination run wild. We had the opportunity to do a quick three-question interview with Lukas Hort of Unechte Sachen.
You are still a very young, new studio and you studied in the city of Darmstadt. How did it come about that you chose Hamburg as the location for your studio?
Being originally from Hamburg, I kept an eye on the game scene back here at home while I studied Animation and Game at the Hochschule Darmstadt. So I was always up to date with everything going on and really wanted to become a part of the community here. With all the studios located here, different networking events and the Gamecity & Kreativgesellschaft supporting us, it was the obvious choice for us. Due to the current situation we haven’t really had the chance to meet many people here so most interactions were done on discord for now, where we did get some useful tips & feedback. And definitely shout out to the team from Monstrum, who let us into their office to use their VR systems, allowing us to test our game on all relevant systems! Can’t wait to finally meet other like minded people here in person!
Puppet Play started as a university project. What were the difficulties of starting up your studio out of university and deciding that this was the project you were going to take off with?
Of course bureaucracy and learning the odds and ends of having a company was tedious and time consuming, but I would say the biggest difficulty was staying motivated throughout the development. It's not that we hate our jobs or the project, the opposite in fact, but starting new in a time like this has its challenges. It’s probably something many can relate to that worked from home the whole time, you sit in your room, work on the same project the whole day and don’t really have the chance to meet new people from the industry. Especially strange when you come fresh out of uni, which is basically the exact opposite of that. What we missed the most were conventions to show off our project to a broader audience. Though at least we had the Steam Next Fest as an online alternative. In the end with some well placed internal deadlines I’d say we still managed fairly well. Choosing which project to go with was one of the easier decisions. Puppet Play started as a uni project in early 2020, we already had a working prototype to start with. And the idea of helping people bring their ideas to life in a new way was a great vision to work from. Additionally with it being a full on sandbox the overall development scope was also manageable for a small team.
What are your goals in the near future? Since Puppet Play is in Early Access, for sure, finalizing that. And then? Is there already something on the horizon or will you take it one step at a time?
As you said we will continue the work on Puppet Play for quite a while as there are still many things that must be improved to realize the full vision of this project. Other than that the next goal should definitely be to rename the company! Or better to really name it in the first place. Budget for this game was tight so I saved the money on protecting a cool company name by postponing that decision and using a generic lame name instead. Not yet sure if that was a good idea. “Luckily” we are not well known yet, so that shouldn’t be a big problem. But actually the next real goal will simply be making a new game, though there isn’t anything concrete yet. And of course finally meeting many like minded people here in the most beautiful city in the world!
Check out Puppet Play, it's currently in Early Access on Steam.
