Stadtkinder
By Studio Monstrum
Funded with 48,000 €
Prototype Funding 2020
In the VR game "Stadtkinder" the player accompanies a group of youths on their expedition through a seemingly deserted Metropolis in search of a lost friend. These challenges have to be tackled by employing a mechanic called "multithreading" which enables the players to cooperate with their own avatars from the past.
The VR game "Stadtkinder" is set in a future in which nature has reclaimed the big cities. Where wild animals roam abandoned streets and crumbling concrete buildings are entwined with climbing vines, a group of teenagers sets out to find a lost friend and uncover the city's long-forgotten secrets in the process.
At the very heart of the game lies a feature called "multithreading", which empowers players to cooperate with their own avatars from the past in order to solve puzzles. The mechanic works like this: After players have performed an action inside a level, they can revert it to its initial state at any point. In addition to their own avatar, they will be joined by a copy of their previous selves, which performs the actions they recorded earlier. This enables players to plan and cooperate with themselves across multiple timelines.
The colourful VR title is the debut work of Studio Monstrum. It aims to make the tricky puzzles especially accessible for VR novices and new players.
The game is the first major release of Studio Monstrum and has been selected and funded as part of the Hamburg Prototype Funding 2020.
About Studio Monstrum
Studio Monstrum is a development studio for games and interactive experiences that has been up to mischief in Hamburg since late 2019. While Shelly is the dark lord of colorful images, Nikolai is the mad scientist responsible for all technical experiments. In addition to digital projects, they also create playful installations and mixed reality applications.
Before the two started pursuing their sinister machinations together as Studio Monstrum, Shelly had already developed various mobile games as a solo developer and won the German computer games award, while Nikolai worked for various start-ups as a VR developer and was lucky enough to receive the nextReality Award in 2019. The two already implemented projects together during their studies.
While Studio Monstrum had to finance themselves through customer orders initially, the Hamburg Prototype Funding 2020 enabled them to work full-time on its debut project, the VR game "Stadtkinder".
The game is scheduled for release for desktop VR and the Oculus Quest in the second quarter of 2022.
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