Meet the Team

We are a battle-experienced team and we have been working together for 4 years. We are passionate about working on games, apps and all kinds of projects that require design, development or other parts of our creative skillset, always aiming to raise the quality of any project by a level - or ten.

Max

Designer & Developer, Co-Founder

Max has already designed, developed and released his first mobile game before entering university. He specializes in Usability, satisfying interactions, Game Feel, Code Architecture, Real-time Networking and Performance Optimization.

Favorite Games

If you can play it, Max has probably tried it. Max loves brutal difficulty, competition and great story-telling. Currently, he plays Divinity: Original Sin 2, Valorant and has an ongoing Civilization 6 duel against Lissi.

Academics

Max achieved a Master of Science in Computer Science, specializing in Human Computer Interaction, with distinction (1.1). During his studies he received various scholarships for excellent performance.

Lissi

Designer & Developer, Co-Founder

Lissi thrives in developing highly customizable systems, designing & programming websites, scripting workflows, arranging UI Mockups, diving into analytics, designing for User Experience and also analyzing games & apps from a psychological viewpoint.

Favorite Games

Having completed probably over a gazillion matches with the same hero, Lissi has been playing Dota 2 on and off for years and also loves the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series with a passion.

Academics

Lissi achieved a Master of Science in Computer Science, specializing in Algorithms and Theory, with distinction (1.2).

Oliver

Developer

Oliver’s journey to becoming a game developer took him to Tyrol, where he learned the fundamentals of IT such as programming, networks, and databases. This knowledge proved useful during his university years in Würzburg, where he studied engine architecture, 3D modeling, and AI.

Favorite Games

One of Oliver’s favorite aspects of gaming is exploring virtual worlds and uncovering their secrets. He started gaming as a child with the Spyro trilogy on the PS1 and is currently looking forward to the upcoming Mario Kart World. Throughout the years, the Kingdom Hearts series has grown alongside him.

Academics

After learning the basics of programming in Austria, Oliver returned to Würzburg and graduated in Games Engineering. During his time at university, he experimented with various game engines, created his own, and completed an internship at Crit Crew, where he caught a glimpse of his next mission.

Tascha

Lead Artist

Tascha enjoys nothing more than bringing ideas to life and exploring story telling through concepts and illustrations. While specialising in character design, she loves accompanying them with prop design and environment art. Her favourite part of being an artist is exploring new 2D art styles and and experimenting with 3D tools like Blender and ZBrush.

Favorite Games

Her love of games began with playing Age of Empires 2 with her father at the age of 8. With AoE2 remaining one of her favourite games to this day, Tascha now especially enjoys games with great story telling and visuals like the Mass Effect series, Elder Scrolls and Dark Souls.

Education

Drawing ever since she could hold a pencil, Tascha started learning to paint with aquarelle classes at the age of 6. After discovering digital art in her teenage years, she began developing her skills as an illustrator and concept artist via self-teaching and courses.

Emily

Developer

Through her diploma she learned hardware as well as low- and high-level software development while being interested in games since her first contact to the RPG Maker in 2001. Emily moved to C# and Unity during university, after which she worked for 5 years in the healthcare industry where she learned how to build scalable backends in .NET. After a brief stint in the automotive industry she landed in game development, fulfilling her lifelong dream. Not a single day goes by where she doesn’t think about software, software architecture and software development.

Favorite Games

In her younger years she enjoyed 3d platformers and shooters on N64 and early pc, then migrated over Minecraft to complex simulations like Factorio, shapez.io and Dwarf Fortress while still retaining a love for first and third person action games like Doom, Wolfenstein and the Horizon Series.

Academics

Although Emily learned C++ self taught at 16, she formalized her knowledge by studying electrical engineering at the university of applied sciences in Schweinfurt. She met the Crit Crew while holding a presentation about scalable multiplayer architecture, which she learned during her iSAQB certification as software architect.

Joshua

Music & Sound Artist

Joshua is an award-winning composer and sound effects designer. While he’s also incredibly talented in sound design, composing music in all imaginable styles is his true forte. His compositions have been performed internationally by a variety of ensembles.

Favorite Games

Currently there’s nothing better than diving deep into the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and once he’s got enough of discovering this unique world, he builds his own in Minecraft.

Academics

Joshua is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in music composition at the University of South Florida (BM’21). As a student there, he was a recipient of the Presser Undergraduate Scholar Award, a prestigious award given to an outstanding undergraduate music majors.

Past Projects

Tower Duel – iOS & Android

Design, Development, Distribution

The Game

Tower Duel is a 1vs1 Tower Defense game for iOS and Android. While building a maze of Towers on their stadium half, players also send Runners to their opponent. Whenever a Runner reaches a player’s End Zone, they lose a health point. The last player standing wins!

Between matches, players build their decks from a selection of 40+ cards with unique effects, which are additionally customizable via an intricate rune-system. This way everybody can come up with their personal battle plan and surprise their opponent with ever new and never seen strategies. Check it out on the App Store or Play Store!

Design & Development

We have designed, developed, released and iterated the game completely as a team under the banner of Forest Ring Games. After the release we kept shipping updates with new content, running Tower Duel as a Game-as-a-Service.

Technology

Tower Duel is based on a variety of intertwined systems, first and foremost a specialized and custom lockstep multiplayer solution. This makes live 1vs1 battles on mobile possible, no matter how bad the connection of players on the go might be.
Additionally it supports customizable bots with a focus on making them behave like a real player. This even goes as far as the bots taking replays of player-matches from similar skill levels as input.

Content Creation

New cards (Towers, Runners & Hacks) can be rapidly prototyped due to an Entity-Component-System. Every team member is able to design, test and balance new cards because of the familiar and intuitive content creation interface that we designed.

Game Design & UX Iteration

Initially we measured a low Day-1 retention, ran detailed analysis and could attribute it to various issues in our tutorial. After resolving those, we conducted UX tests in schools and online to consistently improve the design and verify our changes with the target audience.

After a couple of weeks our Day-1 retention issues were fully resolved and the Day-1 retention skyrocketed to top tier mobile level. This process greatly sharpened our game design and UX skills and will help us to pinpoint and address problems faster or avoid them altogether in any future project we’re tackling.

Knuddels App - iOS

Development, Issue analysis

Knuddels Chat

Knuddels is the biggest German chat with more than one million users. It’s around for 20 years already and offers a variety of functions from classic chat rooms over Tinder-like matchmaking to games. Check it out on the App Store!

Development

Initially Max has been hired to fix various crashes and other issues in the existing Knuddels iOS that was based on Objective-C and Swift. After greatly increasing the stability, Max continued to add several new features into the iOS app and to port features of the Knuddels Android app into the iOS app and later on maintained the Knuddels iOS app for around one year.

Uberachiever

Development

Uberachiever App - iOS

The Uberachiever app was designed to let users set fitness or life goals for themselves and set a timeframe within they want to achieve it. In case they didn’t achieve it, they had to donate a previously set amount of money to a charity of their choice. In either scenario the world would become a slightly better place.

Development

Max developed the first and several further iterations of the Uberachiever iOS app. The functionality was closely ported from the Android app with a focus on a clean, beautiful UI with subtle animations.

3D Puzzle - VR with Razer Hydra

UI/UX Design & Development

3D Puzzle

Max, Lissi and three other team members took part in a challenge of the University of Würzburg to create an easy to interact with 3D Puzzle that supports VR and takes input via a Razer Hydra controller.

Development

The largest hurdle was to make the 3D puzzle visuals quickly readable for the player and to design a way of input that allows for swift and precise interactions. Solving that puzzle should first and foremost feel fun and rewarding. In the end we greatly succeeded by having the easiest to interact with design and also the fastest speed run (see video).

ThinkIn Blocks – iOS, Android, Windows Phone & Web

Development, Porting to Unity

Multi-Platform

After the successful release of the iOS version of ThinkIn Blocks (see further down), Max developed a Unity version of the game for Webfactor Media, the company that acquired ThinkIn Blocks previously.

Further development

Additionally Max also applied various improvements and integrated new graphics (that were provided by the client), better UI and monetization via ads.

Scemory - iOS

Development

The Game

Scemory is an implementation of the classic “Simon” gameplay mechanic as a mobile game. The four differently colored circle segments light up in a random order while also playing a sound. The player has to remember and correctly repeat the sequence via touching the segments.
Additionally, the game had a couple of game modes (e.g. with rotating or randomly switching circle segments) that gave the classic a breath of fresh air.

Development

Scemory was done as a contract job for Webfactor Media, the company that acquired ThinkIn Blocks previously. In this project Max took over the development, the game design and graphics were provided by the client.

The code is based on the original custom game engine for ThinkIn Blocks and since the game isn’t too complex, the development was fast and easy.

ThinkIn Blocks - iOS

Design, Development, Distribution

Game Design

In ThinkIn Blocks players have to solve puzzles similar to classic match-three-games. The twist is that every puzzle is solvable in a certain number of moves and in the end all blocks must be gone. Players can only switch blocks left and right (not up and down).

The game features 14,400 levels with 5 different difficulty levels. All the levels were randomly generated with an algorithm that Max developed for the game. If a level seems unbeatable players can peek and the game will then play back a possible solution.

Development

The game is based on a custom game engine that was programmed specifically for ThinkIn Blocks and the whole game was developed completely within only six weeks.

Acquisition

Originally, Max has designed, developed (including art, music composition and sound effects) and distributed the game himself. Later on the game was acquired by Webfactor Media, a company from Würzburg, and Max did various contract jobs to develop further games for Webfactor and porting ThinkIn Blocks to Unity.

Other Projects

Our Crit Crew team members have also worked on other projects in the past, either unreleased or under NDA. This includes:

  • Jump & Run physics based game with similar mechanics as Tiny Wings
  • Zelda-like RPG
  • Final-fantasy like RPG with a huge hand-drawn map
  • Various music apps & games
    • Midi-Player app for iOS with perfect timing
    • Music instrument apps
    • Music games
  • Graphic design app
  • Various other games