Founded 2013
Employees 10
URL http://ift.tt/1gg37bU
Current project Oddwings Escape
Having worked at Habbo Hotel during its boom years, Timo Soininen knows his way around a successful brand. Today, he’s heading up a new studio looking to build hits of its own, starting with Oddwings Escape.
How did Small Giant get started?
The company was founded in early 2013 by a bunch of Habbo Hotel veterans, including Otto Nieminen and Markus Halttunen. After leaving Habbo, Otto started to put a new rock band together, and we were really lucky to get two of the best animators and graphic designers in this country, Tommi Vallisto and Ilkka Juopperi, to join the team. Our first prototype was built in the summer of 2013, we got the first seed financing after that, and now we have a team of ten with solid VC financing backing us up. And it’s a truly multinational team – Russian, Spanish, Hungarian, Finnish.
The idea of the company, as the name suggests, is to keep the team size to an absolute minimum, because we think that small can be big and beautiful. And keeping things simple keeps you focused. It’s more meaningful and fun for top, talented guys to have full responsibility
and accountability for what they do.
Is it just coincidence that your debut game has birds in it?
Yeah, it is actually a complete coincidence. Some of our upcoming characters are definitely not birds, but they can still fly. It, for sure, has nothing to do with the other birdy companies of this country or any other. It just happened. You know, we didn’t want to do yet another racing game, we wanted something that from a story perspective can resonate with a lot of users, young and old.
Given that you’re a small company, is everyone here free to put forth ideas for game concepts and so on?
Oh, absolutely. I’ve often said that some people, especially people outside of the business, use words like ‘coders’ for certain people, but that’s not what they are – these guys are all game developers and designers in their own right; they have all the influence over what’s happening. I think that makes the work much more meaningful, rather than being put in a cubicle and told to code to a spec. That’s so old-fashioned – it doesn’t yield any good results.
The mobile game market has never been more fierce, so how do you stand out?
The only way to survive and stand out is to differentiate. Rather than trying doing yet another match-three game, or trying to imitate Clash Of Clans, it’s better to try to create something new. We’re firm believers that you have to use tested and proven techniques and features, but blend them together in a new way. It’s important to not be bounded by category definitions, but to really try to create new types of games while borrowing a little bit from other areas. It’s about creating new soup from old ingredients, if you like. A key component for us is taking the animation and visual quality in these casual games to a completely new level in terms of detail. We’re also focusing more [than other games of this type] on the story depth, which adds longevity to our games. Finally, we firmly believe that multiplayer and social features are key in making games even more fun and engaging. We build our games from the ground up with social and multiplayer features in mind, so they become an integral part of the experience.
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