TeamCrew, a group of students from Campus Gotland in Uppsala, have been nominated at this year’s Unity Awards.
“We just expected to make a game, learn from it and move on,” says Semih Parlayan, Lead Programmer at TeamCrew about their game, Frog Climbers. Frog Climbers started as a task for a course at Uppsala’s Campus Gotland and has since won prices at the Campus’ own Gotland Game Conference, the Swedish Game Awards and is now nominated to a Unity Award as well as being a finalist at “Sense of Wonder” at the Tokyo Game Show.
“We’re very happy to have made something that people like. We hope to win, of course, but at the moment we’re just excited to be nominated. I mean, we’re nominated in the same competition as Grow Home. We love Grow Home!”, says Game Designer Sebastian Larsson about the Unity nomination.
The team at TeamCrew consists of five design students at Campus Gotland and the company got started only this spring, Sebastian Larsson explains:
TeamCrew with their awards from Swedish Game Awards
“We made Frog Climbers for a course, where we had to make a game in eight weeks. We all liked each other and wanted to keep working together,” he says.
Frog Climbers is a 4-person multiplayer in 2D, where you and your frog avatar compete against your friends in a chaotic race to the top. And even though the game is some way from being finished – according to TeamCrew, it’s currently around 70% done – the feedback has already been very positive:
“People are having a lot of fun with the game. We’ve had a lot of continuous feedback, especially from our teachers and fellow students at Campus Gotland, and everyone has a lot of fun with pulling each other down and being douchebags,” Sebastian Larsson says, laughing.
As of right now, Frog Climbers doesn’t have a release date. Because the team still in school, they’re not able to dedicate 100% of their time to the game’s development. But their focus right now is to finish Frog Climbers and then sort of go from there, says Sebastian Larsson:
In Frog Climbers, you compete against your friends to get your frog to the top first,
“We don’t really have a 10 year plan or anything like that. Right now, we’re enjoying the design process and we want to keep making games that challenge us,” he says.
The team will be present at both Tokyo Game Show, the Unity Awards, and Dreamhack over the next couple of months, showing off Frog Climbers.