Teku Studios, an indie studio located in Teruel, Spain, have officially unveiled atheir debut game titled Candle and launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds needed for its development. Its creators describe Candle as a “dynamic graphic adventure”, since its gameplay combines both Platformer and graphic ddventure genres.
The player takes control of Teku, a young and inexperienced character in his journey to save his friends and unravel the mysteries of his world. Through his epic journey he will face many trials and puzzles that the player has to solve using his mind and inventiveness. The key feature of Candle’s gameplay comes from a very specific ability of Teku: instead of a hand, he carries a candle that can be lit at certain places, and he must do whatever he can to prevent it from being extinguished.
Candle is being developed with a very unique and innovative process. The team explains it: “we paint the entire graphics of the game in a traditional way with watercolors, and then we scan all that in order to build the sprites of the environments, items, menus, etc. Also, the animations of every character and animal in the game are not digital, we draw and paint them frame by frame, then we scan every image and build the spritesheets for the animations instead. Once we have done all this working in Unity, we build each level, each scene and each character and so we get a nice handmade look for the visuals.”
The team at Teku Studios clarifies: “it wasn’t easy to achieve this result. We knew since the early development stages that we wanted this to be our own art direction, but there are few-to-zero references out there on how to deal with such process”, and that’s why “we believe that our method can truly give a personal and unique feeling to our games. If there’s one feature that we would be glad if people talked about, it is that”.
Teku Studios will also launch a Greenlight campaign this Summer to get the game into Steam, and if the campaign succeeds the game will not only be available throught that platform, but also feature some key Steamworks functionalities such as Achievements, gamepad support and Cloud Saving. Candle will also be available through Teku Studios’ website completely DRM-Free. Also, Teku Studios has revealed several stretch goals for their crowdfunding campaign to take Candle to Linux, Mac, Wii U and even PS4 and Xbox One.
Candle is set to be released this December on PC in both English and Spanish.
