Two years ago, a group of aspiring studio founders enrolled in the first-ever Xbox Game Studios Game Camp in New Orleans, where they received the tools, resources, and mentoring to make their studio dreams a reality.
Ghost Garden Games is an emerging, female-owned, gender-biased studio based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The team was officially formed in 2015 when a group of high school friends discovered their passion for telling narrative stories in an interactive way.
“The original contributors were Asher, Leslie, Claire and I,” said Kathryn Nastasi, Ghost Garden Games producer and technical artist. “Claire was a teacher who mentored us in high school, and we remember meeting in her classroom every day and discussing the idea of Echo, This is this little sound wave and its companion light ball, Hue. Over the course of a couple of years we really grew that idea into a wonderful story and that was the project that we eventually brought to the first Game Camp.”
Game Camp was founded with the goal of providing aspiring game developers from traditionally marginalized communities with access to subject matter experts, tools and industry connections. The program offered a mentoring experience that taught fundamental game creation engines, programming and game design skills through a mix of self-paced learning and live classes.
During camp, the Ghosts realized they needed to step back and build a strong foundation for their studio before they could develop anything echo. Therefore, during the program, they focused heavily on researching their interests and defining the organizational structure of their team.
The participating teams were paired with mentors from Xbox Game Studios and even had the opportunity to discuss their ideas with industry legends like Shannon Loftis and Ken Lobb. The Ghosts have had support from Erin Ali, a game camp mentor and principal producer at Turn 10 Studios, throughout the program and have even continued to meet with her every six weeks after camp.
“I was thinking about ways to collaborate with groups and support the next generation of industry developers when I saw an article on our company’s intranet about the launch of Game Camp in New Orleans. I remember how difficult it was both to get into the industry and to understand how it was developing,” Ali said. “I have always enjoyed seeing others achieve success and mentoring has been a meaningful way for me to express that joy in the industry. I hope Ghost Garden Games has enjoyed their experience with me as much as I have learned from them.”
Ghost Garden Games officially became an LLC in December 2020. “We left the first game camp feeling like we could go out and make our studio dreams a reality,” said Nastasi. Since then they have moved into their own studio space within a technology park and blossomed into a team of nine.
However, according to Nastasi, the team quickly realized that this was the case echo was driven by passion, it was a little too ambitious for [their] current capabilities and goals.” Consequently, the Ghosts settled into their studio space in Baton Rouge and began evaluating their next steps.
“We took inspiration from something that caught our eye Supergiant Games have with their latest release Hades. They took different systems from their different games..bastion, transistor, and pyre…and perfected them for Hades,” Nastassi said.
The team decided to implement this strategy in their own work and they have shifted their focus from echo to headspace. headspace is a narrative point and click couch co-op game. The goal of headspace is to solve a puzzle in the human body by exploring left and right brain perspective to allow two players to work together and solve a puzzle together. The studio is currently in the design and prototyping phase for headspace and will be bringing it to Game Camp New Orleans 2022 in hopes of getting feedback from Xbox Game Studios mentors.
“Ultimately we decided to sign up for Game Camp 2022 because we are so much more organized as a studio now. We have such a better idea of what we’re doing and we’d love to go in and learn and focus on some of the areas that we couldn’t focus on the first time,” Nastasi said. “For those interested in game development, this is the best opportunity to get personal advice from gaming industry professionals.”
For Xbox Game Studios Game Camp details, see xbox.com/gamecamp. Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for the latest Xbox Game Studios news.
