Two years ago, a group of soon-to-be studio founders enrolled in the first-ever Xbox Game Studios Game Camp in New Orleans, where they received the tools, resources, and mentorship needed to turn their studio dreams into a reality. Now, Ghost Garden Games is an up-and-coming, women-led, gender-inclusive studio based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The team was officially formed in 2015 when a group of high school friends discovered a passion for telling narrative-driven stories in an interactive way.
While at the camp, the “Ghosts” realized that they needed to step back and build a strong foundation for their studio before starting work on their first idea for a game (Echo). As a result, during the program, they focused heavily on exploring their interests and defining the organizational structure of their team. Ghost Garden Games later officially became an LLC in December of 2020.
“We left the first Game Camp feeling really confident about going out and making our studio dreams a reality,” said Kathryn Nastasi, Producer and Technical Artist of Ghost Garden Games. Since then, they have moved into their own studio space within a technology park and have blossomed into a nine-person team.
They got to work on Echo. However, according to Nastasi, the team quickly became aware that although Echo was fueled by passion, it “was a little overambitious for [their] current skillsets and goals.” Consequently, the Ghosts sat down in their Baton Rouge studio space and began to evaluate their next steps.
The team decided to implement that strategy in their own work, shifting their focus from Echo to Headspace, a narrative, point-and-click, couch co-op game. The objective of the game is to solve a mystery inside the human body by exploring the left and right brain perspectives to allow two players to collaborate and solve a mystery together. The studio is currently in the design and prototype phases for Headspace and will bring it to Game Camp New Orleans 2022 in hopes of getting feedback from Xbox Game Studios mentors.
“Ultimately, we decided to enroll in Game Camp 2022 because we are so much more organized as a studio now,” said Nastasi. “We have such a greater idea of what we are doing, and we’d love to walk in and learn and focus on some of the areas we did not get to focus on the first time. For those interested in developing games, this is the best opportunity to receive one-on-one guidance from professionals in the gaming industry.”
(All information was provided by Xbox Wire)
Check out the industry-leading META Woman podcast where we discuss everything about women in gaming and the metaverse
0 comments on “Women-Led Independent Developer Studio Shares Their Experience At Xbox Game Studios Camp”