We are a battle-experienced team and we have been working together for 6 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 has already designed, developed and released the first mobile game before entering university. Max specializes in Usability, satisfying interactions, Game Feel, Code Architecture, Real-time Networking and Performance Optimization.
If you can play it, Max has probably tried it. Max loves brutal difficulty, competition and great story-telling. The current evening program includes Blue Prince, Jupiter Hell, Factorio and Outer Wilds.
Max achieved a Master of Science in Computer Science, specializing in Human Computer Interaction, with distinction (1.1). While enrolled Max received various scholarships for excellent performance.
Lissi thrives in developing highly customizable systems, designing & programming websites, project planning, arranging UI Mockups, diving into analytics, designing for User Experience and also analyzing games & apps from a psychological viewpoint.
Having completed probably over a gazillion matches with the same two heroes, Lissi has been playing Dota 2 on and off for years and also loves the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, as well as Against the Storm and Slay the Spire.
Lissi achieved a Master of Science in Computer Science, specializing in Algorithms and Theory, with distinction (1.2).
Tascha enjoys nothing more than bringing ideas to life and exploring story telling through concepts and illustrations. While specializing in character design, she loves accompanying them with prop design and environment art. Her favorite part of being an artist is exploring new 2D art styles and and experimenting with 3D tools like Blender and ZBrush.
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 favorite 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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. This includes composing for games such as Dead as Disco, Blood Line: A Rebel Moon Game, Sirocco and Beyond Blue: After The Storm. His compositions have been performed internationally by a variety of ensembles.
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.
Joshua holds an MM in music composition from Penn State University. While studying for his bachelor’s at the University of South Florida, he was a recipient of the Presser Undergraduate Scholar Award, a prestigious award given to an outstanding undergraduate music majors.
We developed three web-based language learning games for the publishing house Hueber: Quiz, racing and basketball. All games work with different standard exercise types such as single-choice, multiple-choice, matching and sorting exercises. The games are embedded in Hueber’s digital books.
Content in the form of exercises with associated images and audio files can be created and configured by the client themselves using the accompanying user-friendly content editor.
Inspired by TV quiz shows, in “Quiz” up to 4 players or teams compete for the most stars by answering single-choice questions.
At each team’s disposal are two jokers, which they can strategically use for difficult questions - or try to save them, as they can serve as a tie-breaker when determining the winner. To keep things interesting both questions and answers can include text, pictures or audio.
The “Racing” game features up to four snails trying to reach the delicious vegetable snack beyond the finish line first.
The race is split in two phases: Headstart and catch-up. For the headstart, each team rapidly answers questions on a timer to try and gain an advantage. Afterwards during the catch-up phase teams take turns solving single-choice, multiple-choice, sorting or matching-tasks. In this phase, whenever a team answers incorrectly, the task gets transferred to a random team behind. This allows them to move their snail forward instead and catch up, if they get it right.
In “Basketball” players answer single-choice questions to quickly shoot as many hoops as possible within a set timer. Since the game is designed for fast gameplay it features only easy questions with two answers to choose from.
Our work on all three games included not just the programming, but also game design, UX, the hand-drawn graphics and animations as well as original sound and music.
Since every instance of a game that is embedded into one of Hueber’s books will need between 40-60 exercises, it was crucial to make the process of creating, as well as reusing content as easy and efficient as possible. In order to facilitate this, we defined a unified JSON-format for exercises, which works the same across all three games. This shared format allowed us to create a fallback-system, which can pull questions from any other exercise-pool, once it runs out of questions in the current one. To help with creating and editing those JSON-files, we implemented a web-based editor with forms, dropdowns and extensive validations and checks. This ensures that any file coming from the editor will be able to run in the game without any errors such as incorrect formatting, missing data or forgetting to mark which answer is the correct one.
Most of the game design for this project was developed in close collaboration with the Hueber team during a one-week workshop, which we prepared and facilitated. This process allowed us to get important input early on, understand the requirements of different departments, come up with lots of cool ideas, but also prioritize them according to client’s needs and goals.
For the publishing house Kosmos, in addition to several Unity software modules, we primarily developed a login and account system (single sign-on) for both apps and websites.
The choice of technology was one of the most important tasks. Together with Kosmos, we decided to use the Open-source software Keycloak for user registration and authentication. We hosted a development Keycloak server using Docker Stack to evaluate this plan. Due to easier handling and reusability, we used a monolithic docker compose file for configuration.
Beside authentication, a solution for managing app-specific user data was needed. After some research and consultation, we decided on PlayFab, a platform with which we have many years of experience (e.g. with our game Tower Duel).
We set up PlayFab and implemented the Keycloak-PlayFab-login-flow within an example app and based on multiple reusable Unity packages. Additionally, we created example code for the usage of some specific PlayFab features, in order to make the usage of the necessary functionality easier down the road (saving data, calling of Azure Functions, etc.)
Ultimately, we had created a fully functioning vertical slice for user registration, login, PlayFab-authentication, data management, etc. running on iOS, Android and in the Unity-Editor. Parts of the entire system can now be integrated from this vertical slice into existing or newly developed apps.
We redesigned and developed 3 different augmented reality Apps for the toy company WOW! Stuff. The Lightpainting App lets users record videos of themselves, where they write or draw in the air using an LED toy-wand. Both the Invisibility and RealFX Thing App work with a greenscreen effect: Users can wear an invisibility cloak to disappear on camera, or use a green sleeve in order to appear as a disembodied hand.
The Apps make use of various advanced camera features on both Android and iOS: Users can manually adjust exposure time and ISO or switch between day- and nightmode to get the right lighting. Videos and Snapshots can afterwards be saved to camera roll as mp4 and png files.
Before starting with the development, we worked with WOW! Stuff to define and design all screens and functionality in figma on the basis of client’s existing apps.
To make the interface as easy to understand and approachable as possible most of the design was kept in line with what users know from their pre-installed camera apps. We also used icons instead of text whenever possible, with the side bonus, that only minimal translation work was needed. All screens were designed to be responsive and included both a portrait and landscape version. By making sure we understood and aligned with clients wishes beforehand, designing all screens and defining all features we were able to avoid unexpected changes or reworks down the road.
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!
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.
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.
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 online and in-person UX tests 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.
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.
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!
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.