HISTORY
 

The Space Backyard started in 2016 as a creative-duo formed by Alessandro and Simone. We were fed up with the rigid mechanisms that ruled a big game company such as the one where we met and worked as colleagues. At that point we were eager to craft something new, independently. “The Story of the Revolutionary Watermelon…” was our first game: it involved the slapping of a watermelon (a real one!), and it was conceived as a barbaric yawp against the industry, a tribute to Limbo, and our first act of freedom. We developed it for the Watermelon Game Jam, which was organised by Gianluca, it ended up being selected by Game Happens, an independent and international festival in Genova (Italy), where we met Maddalena, and it was featured on Kotaku. Later, both Gianluca and Maddalena joined the team. In short, we may say that our studio was born under the sign of a watermelon that indeed had revolutionary powers since it has brought us all together, in some weird magical way. Concerning our roles, we are all professionals coming from different backgrounds, and we nurture our individual passions as a means to enrich our common interest in game making. Simone is the 3D artist and character animator, Alessandro is the art director and a generalist, Gianluca is a generalist specialised in coding, Maddalena is the writer and narrative designer. As gamemakers, our method is to make the most of the interactivity that video games provide as a medium to tell stories in a gentle and captivating way: we find inspiration in the hidden gems dwelling in between the lines of yesteryear news. By choosing to embrace a minimalist aesthetic, we directly engage with the player’s emotions, expectations, and memories. Specifically, we love to tell stories that manifest the granularity of everyday life and we manage to do so by sewing them directly to elements taken from history.