A Belfast games studio is excited ahead of the launch of its first published title in the coming months.
Bellular Studios, was founded by university friends Thomas Hislop and Michael Bell around seven years ago and has since grown from strength to strength. It's now preparing the finishing touches on its first published title - The Pale Beyond - a narrative driven role playing game set during a fantasy Antarctic expedition.
It is the culmination of years of hard work by the studio pair, who have built on previous cancelled prototypes to create an experience they are very proud of.
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Speaking to Belfast Live., creative director Thomas Hislop described how the studio came together and the ups and downs they have had over the years that have led them to where they are today.
He said: "I met Michael while we were doing a programming course at Queen's University and at the time I never imagined that we would find ourselves starting a company developing games together.
"While I have always had a passion for games, during my time in university studying programming I became heavily involved with theatre and drama and focused a lot of my spare time writing my own plays and getting involved with that community.
"During that time Michael had started his own Youtube channel, Bellular Gaming, and was beginning to get quite a sizable following, which has now grown to hundreds of thousands of people.
"Bellular Studios came about as our university placement when we felt that we would be able to combine our different skills and finally put out degrees to good use and thanks to some funding from NI Screen we started working on our first project together."
The first game that the budding studio tried to develop was for mobile called “Stanberry’s Mistake” which was cancelled during production. This was followed by How to Kill Monsters” as part of the 2017/18 UK Games Fund Programme which met a similar fate and a special mod for World of Warcraft, which was unable to get off the ground for legal reasons.
However, these attempts helped the studio to learn the difficulties there are while trying to develop a game and they have used these experiences in the creation of their new project, The Pale Beyond.
Thomas continued: "Our first few attempts at creating games have taught us what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong and a lot of this came down to the scope of the games that we were trying to create, where we were probably trying to do something that was a bit beyond our capabilities.
"With The Pale Beyond we have managed to utilise our amazing team in ways that bring out the best in all of us, whilst keeping the complexity of the game itself manageable. We have focused on ensuring that everyone has as much creative freedom within their discipline as possible and there are touches of each of our personalities in various aspects of the game.
"It is based on the polar expeditions that took place in the early 1900s such as the Shackleton expedition where you will be leading a diverse team of explorers onboard a ship with the aim of keeping everyone working together as a team as they try and work their way out of the treacherous terrain after getting stuck in the ice.
"While doing our research for the game we noticed there were a few similarities between these arctic expeditions and the work we were doing. Most of them were like small start-up businesses, similar to ourselves, featuring people from across the UK and Ireland trying to do something very complex while managing a team full of very different personalities."
Thomas said that The Pale Beyond has a strong emphasis on its artistic design with all of the characters, environments, music and sound effects being created in house. The noises for the sled dogs come from their audio director stopping dogs in Lagan Meadows and getting them to bark.
He continued: "Everything in the game has been made in-house by our team or some of the great contractors that we have been lucky to work with. We have developed our own music and songs and have even made our own sound effects such as ice crunching and dogs barking.
"The artistic design of the game has been a real focus of ours and helps to create the perfect atmosphere to bring our story to life for players."
Bellular Studios have partnered with Australian games publisher Fellow Traveller Games to produce the project and it is currently being tested ahead of a release at the end of 2022 or start of 2023.
Thomas said: "It was amazing to have our game officially picked up by a publisher and we have been thrilled with the relationship we have developed with them since they’ve provided us the resources, industry experience, and structure we needed, whilst still allowing us to retain creative freedom on the project.
"We are currently at the stage where we are having the game tested by our community so that we are able to work out all of the bugs and issues ahead of its release.
"There is already a good bit of buzz around the game with some high profile gaming Youtubers talking about it and spreading the word ahead of its release.
"We have had so much fun developing The Pale Beyond and we hope that it will resonate with players and give us an opportunity to create more games in the future."
The Pale Beyond can be wishlisted on Steam for PC and Mac OS today
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