Well first off, that’s a difficult question to answer. As a studio, we have many faces, and we’re doing many things at once. But I’ll give it a shot.
On any given day, at heart we are a passionate indie games studio working on developing games which if we were the customer, they would be our favourite games. That’s who we are. But also on any given day, we are a super-efficient, gun-for-hire digital agency who can make you anything you want: the coolest websites, the most stand out graphics and media as well as ahead of the curve apps and games. It’s hard to be both, but we’re managing it as we learn and grow.
We truly are both of these things. But who Aphelio really are, is a band of three individuals who have started this journey together with a common mission. And rather than talk about each of us individually, I’m going to explain what we are collectively bringing to the games industry and wider businesses industries as a whole.
Aphelio represent a fresh take on things. The games industry is all over the place at the moment, and rather than analyse what’s going wrong or right with the industry and look outwards, I’m going to look inwards at what we can do to change it. Starting with our philosophy.
Basically, we’ll do anything just to be different. Different is better. Different is what makes the world a fun place. Being different is part of our mission.
What we aim to do is simply offer an alternative to what’s already out there. We don’t bash it, we don’t criticise it, and we don’t knock it. All we want to do is give you guys something different. That is our mission, and what we as a company bring to the table.
So how are we doing on this mission?
Well, to be honest, we haven’t even reached the starting grid yet. We have been developing our core technologies over the last few months and are at the point where were almost ready to test our game engine with a simple but fun game.
Our first mission (regarding our own products) is to launch this game, test our HTML5 engine, and get our cross platform multiplayer working. We have chosen a relatively simple yet fun game to launch first, as we want to keep problems on the games design side of things as smooth as possible, while we tackle the mammoth, daunting, and highly ambitious task of integrating cross platform multiplayer.
Think of our first release as a test run for the engine to check everything is in place. Once we have that game up and running in multiplayer, then we will be at the starting grid ready to put the pedal to the metal once the lights go green and start churning out games like there’s no tomorrow. This first game is just the beginning.
But all this highly creative vision actually exists in the real world, and whilst we have time to develop this amazing technology, like all game developers we need to eat, and eat we shall. This is because we have made the conscious decision to undertake some exciting contract work to develop some inspirational apps and websites whilst also working on our own products and game engine, hence our status as a ‘gun-for-hire’. This focus therefore completes our strategy as a business, and is a piece of advice I would recommend to any games studio or any business for that matter in order to survive.
Working with clients in this way has been great for us. We’ve met some interesting people, designed for customers other than our own and we’ve also gotten to see the world outside of our indie studio ‘bubble’. And we’ve had some fun and learnt a few things along the way.
We’ll keep you updated on our various pieces of work-for-hire in the future, as all of them are interesting in their own way, either through their design or because they are for a good cause (we hope to announce these ones soon!). We can also use the technology we develop on these projects to help build our own games engine technology, and similarly we can use the technology we develop for our own games on future projects, so it’s really a win-win for Aphelio and you as the players and customers.
To summarise, those two focuses are essentially who we are and what we are doing at the moment. This is how a real indie games company works, this is real life. I hope you have enjoyed reading this insight, and I hope other indie developers like to see that they’re not alone. If they and you the community can learn from our experience over the coming blogs, then we will be very happy.
On that note, we’re going to be blogging very regularly as we think it is imperative to uphold our transparent culture as a studio, and we hope to interest you and entertain you as much as we can (comedy relief blogs to follow).
That’s all for now, thanks for reading I hope you are beginning to understand us more as you begin this epic journey with us. One day you can be one of those people who claim “I was there for the first blog post!”
Which reminds me, sign up to our Test Pilots Initiative on our website to test our games for us in the future and then your claim will be legit.
See you in the stratosphere,
Mike
P.S. Has anyone figured out where the name Aphelio comes from?
Aphelion is the point on the orbit of a celestial body that is farthest from the sun. Is it something similar or is it actually where it came from?
Pretty much yeah! We were trying to come up with company names, but were struggling, so came up with the mission/ethos first, which was standing out from the crowd and being different. From there the name and the space theme/branding evolved quite nicely! Then we chopped off the 'n' on the end of 'Aphelion' just to be different again and create a slightly new and unique word, and to get the .com url of course!
I tried looking at your page but the images are all over the place looks like the code (or my browser!) is broken :P
- Mike
Yup. The page modifications are intended to be for ModDB, hehe. :P
But sadly, the template for IndieDB & ModDB is different, so I couldn't do anything about it. xD