FoxTale Creations and their game about facing & accepting mistakes
ABOUT US
“I decided to get into game industry few years back and got into touch with someone I knew had a bit more experience than I to get guidance from. I got advised to seek education and do my homework as they so much more knowingly stated, game development is so much more than coming up with cool ideas for games. As a naive young over enthusiastic to-be-developer I thought to myself, Let’s see about that. Couple years later I realised they were right. They were so right. Games are so much more than coming up with cool ideas.
Personally I love video games. I love the stories and the experiences, the feeling of something going on a journey out of this world. But most importantly I love games as a medium to share ideas, stories and messages and as a way to expand your way of seeing the world. I believe games deserve to be seen as so much more than mindless way to spend time. I believe games should be worth making time for.”
- Timi Pahlstén
“I have always loved stories and imaginary worlds. And games. My first love was a board game probably inherited from some older cousin with colorful snails racing against each other. I had names for all of them and a world full of adventures. I was around twelve or so when I got my first console, Nintendo GameCube, and fell in love again with The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of time. Oh how I dreamed of being able to create something similar!
However, it took me years to find the courage to follow my dreams. Years during which I thought I didn’t have a right to be part of the gaming industry. Unlike my gamer friends, I hadn’t held the controller ever since before I could walk and I was way over twenty before I bought my first gaming computer. I tried studying Educational Sciences, Phonetics, Literature and Finnish Language before realising there was more than one kind of people fit for creating games. Because of my own journey, I want to do my part in making sure everyone feels welcome in the gaming community.”
- Jenni Hirvonen
ABOUT FOXTALE CREATIONS
We first met in the first year of our game development studies in Turku University of Applied Sciences back in 2018. The first game development group assignment was quite the experience for us. It was our first dip into the world of what real game development and work is. We had zero experience and almost nothing worked, which in hindsight was the case for many others, but worst part were the things we had no idea could become a problem. The enormous size of five person group, neverending pitching trying to explain the direction our digital tree falls in the game and multiple very creative and constructive conversations of whether or not there should be a giant castle in the background of our game. We still loved it.
It was 2019 when we really started to talk about our own company. Only now there would be two of us. Right from the beginning we knew we wanted to make games that actually matter. We started to build our company based on this thought, and chose our company values to be open-mindedness, creative freedom and pure unfiltered ambition. We believe games can be a force for good not compromising the joy and fun of playing them. Games don’t have to be serious educational games to change lives and the world.
After working on the company and spitballing ideas for the first game for about a year, we stumbled on Boost Startup Journey during Global Game Jam 2020. After a small research we decided this would be the perfect next step for our gaming company. So far we have learned to build community, different plans for marketing, business models and so on, and of course met amazing friendly people.
ABOUT BACK FOR YOU
The project we are currently working on is a game about facing and accepting mistakes and doing your best to fix them. It’s a story driven 3D adventure game with stylized visuals and gameplay built around environmental storytelling and exploration. The idea of the game was born of our mutual love for retro futuristic science fiction and Finnish nature.