Samorost was short and quirky, gaining Dvorský a grade B. Then it went viral and exploded.”Īn early title for Apple Arcade, Pilgrims was born from a minigame developed for Samorost 3. I launched it on the web to make it easily playable for professors and a bunch of my friends. “I worked quite intuitively, and it was only at the end of the development when I realised I’d created a game. “I wanted to create an experimental interactive project or a website using Photoshop collages from my photos and simple animations made in Flash,” he recalls. He began work on a game called Samorost for his thesis project. In 1997, Dvorský studied Animation Film at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. It was an excellent time to grow and create, that’s for sure.” “The mood is so much darker today our current prime minister is a former Communist state security agent and the society is torn, hateful, and divided. “It was a very euphoric and hopeful era, and I’m glad I could experience it myself and be part of it,” Dvorský says. Four years later, the country peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The non-violent Velvet Revolution returned Czechoslovakia to a liberal democracy in 1989, ending 41 years of Communist one-party rule. When Dvorský began creating games, he did so in an environment that was very different from his parents, and he admits to being lucky in this regard. I was a fairly typical dark-romantic kid, I guess.”Ĭhuchel took six years to make, with developer Jára Plachý taking an organic approach to its design. I also read many science-fiction books, listened to death metal records, drew maps and bizarre castles, and spent time camping in the wilderness. “I started with 8-bit games but got seriously hooked later with early PCs, adventure games, and dungeon crawlers. “I was a gamer as a kid but never a hardcore one,” he says. Still, that free-form thinking would soon define Dvorský’s approach to his art. Even so, it took three years to get the game ready for release in 1997 because the pair couldn’t settle on a genre. He’d combined genres and styles that he liked at that time, “and, surprisingly, it kind of worked,” he says. That game was Asmodeus: Tajemný kraj Ruthaniolu, which Dvorský designed with Marek Floryán. “A year or two later, I was already a game designer working on my own project, a combination of a dungeon crawler and adventure game with half hand-drawn graphics and half pre-rendered 3D.” “At first I worked as an animator, helping my friends with their point-and-click adventure game,” he says referring to his time at the indie studio, NoSense. It still needs a lot of work, and we haven’t even announced it officially yet.”Ĥ_.jpg” alt=”” width=”1920″ height=”1080″ />īotanicula tells the whimsical tale of five tiny tree creatures on a journey to rescue the last seed from their parasite-infested home.ĭvorský’s game-making career began when he was 15 years old. “But it’s too early to talk further about this game. “Phonopolis is being developed by a new team who’ve brought yet another art style to our studio,” says Dvorský. Phonopolis is also in the works: a puzzle game designed by a three-person team which makes use of handmade paper models, which are then photographed and turned into animated 3D objects. Happy Game is due for release in the spring, and it’s demanding the studio’s full attention – “I’m quite busy these days,” Dvorský says – but then, these are exciting times for Amanita. We encourage him to do so and help him to realise his vision, no matter if it’s happy and playful or scary and disturbing.” Wild Times Jára doesn’t plan and mull over things too much he just creates. “This time he’s created something much darker – we really don’t know what’s going on in his crazy head. “It’s going to be Jára Plachý’s latest game,” says Dvorský of the developer he’s worked with for over a decade. Announced at Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase in mid-December last year, Happy Game is far less jolly than its title implies. Happy Game, on the other hand, will take the studio into slightly less family-friendly territory. But their games also defy a number of genre conventions, taking players on wordless journeys that let their worlds and the thoughts of their tiny characters speak for themselves. Amanita’s games are mostly point-and-click adventures and share an enchanting style, both in their art and sound. The studio’s passion is such that its games aren’t released until they’re deemed as perfect as they can be. From Samorost to Machinarium and from Botanicula to Chuchel, Amanita’s games are carefully engineered mixtures of the natural, the industrial, and the downright surreal.
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