CREEPY JAR

On leaving the big leagues and surviving the wilds of indie game development

- Chris Burke

Leaving the safety of a steady job with an established game developer and going it alone is an adventurous move – it’s a jungle out there, after all. But echoing the themes of its Amazonian survival game Green Hell, Creepy Jar’s small team of Polish developers parted ways with Techland, where they had senior roles in the development of Dead Island and Dying Light, and set out to make their own way in the world.

Founding members Krzysztof Kwiatek and Krzysztof Satek had been a partnership long before Techland came calling, their interest in game development formed through a mutual “addiction to games”. As part of a studio called L’art, the two Krzysztofs’ first game was 2003 skijumping sim, Skoki Narciarskie: Polski Orzet. “At the time, ski-jumping was very popular in Poland because of Adam Malysz, who was a superstar here,” Satek recalls (indeed, Malysz himself graced the box art).

Buoyed by the success of this literal jumpingoff point, Satek and Kwiatek founded a new studio, Prominence, and turned their hand to a different kind of sim game, creating a prototype of an illegal street racer with the working title of Dirty Roar. The team’s search for a publisher yielded interest from the Wroctaw, Poland-based Techland, and while Dirty Roar itself was never completed, Techland was impressed enough by Prominence’s demo that it hired the studio to create two other motorsport games, the Volkswagen-licensed GTI Racing, and rally sequel Xpand Rally Xtreme. By Satek’s own admission, the pair still had a lot to learn about game development – “We thought we knew how to create games after Ski Jumping, and it wasn’t true!” – but the relationship would prove fruitful.