Company Name:
Date Founded:
2017
Business Type:
Game Studio
Location:
Edinburgh
Managing Director:
Josh Mattyasovszky
Key Staff:
Tech Director – Dan Allison
Number of Employees:
Two, but recruiting!
Contact Details:
Social Media Links
Key Games
Pax Narcotica: The Line – https://www.stone-spark.com/pax-narcotica-the-line-2/
Main Areas Of Business:
Original IP
Elevator pitch:
We are combining big studio experience with small team flexibility and freedom to take on themes that we find interesting. In our opinion, games are at their strongest when they present a strong set of tools and systems and trust the player to craft their own stories, rather than be lead down a narrative path, and that is exactly what we plan to do.
Projects and/or Partners:
We aren’t at liberty to reveal anything just yet, but within the coming weeks we hope to announce both a publishing partner, and an investment partner, both of whom are fairly legendary in the gaming world.
To say we are excited is an understatement, but for now we are staying schtum.
Greatest achievement So Far:
Getting ourselves to Develop:Brighton with a playable demo. Our first big milestone, we decided last minute to go and showcase the game and not just drink beer and network, and with minimal lead time we whipped a bunch of fractured gameplay elements into something that could actually be played. While it made us realise just how much work there was that needed doing, it showed us we were capable of doing it.
Tell us something about you that nobody really knows:
Pax Narcotica: The Line was originally a game about fur trappers. The player had to explore a procedural wilderness hunting for pelts and trading at outposts. However the theme didn’t quite grab us, and the design wasn’t suited to that type of game, it was a bit of a square-peg-round-hole scenario. However the systems of trade, exploration, recruitment etc., sat much better with the drug trade.
Most of the map code was adapted from the trapper game, with Mountains and Forests becoming Skycrapers and Tenements. In fact in the code, major roads are still called ‘Tribs’, or tributaries, from when the roads were actually rivers.
Willing to challenge other companies at which online/multiplayer game:
All the 3s – Halo 3, Burnout 3, Tekken 3. Each franchise reached peak perfection at number 3, everything after is just bells and whistles.
Between starting Stone Spark and having a 5 year old, my days of online competitive gaming are long past. When I get time to myself to play something I do not want to lose, I barely want a challenge. I want to feel like a conquering Master of the Universe who bends reality to his will, I do not want to feel like a knackered old man getting his arse kicked because his reaction speed is shot.
Dan is all about Apex: Legends
Best Console Ever?
PSX – I remember going to see Hackers at the cinema, and there’s the scene where they’re hanging out in the coolest bar/arcade ever, and they are playing a version of Wipeout, and it was just the coolest thing I had ever seen. That was the feeling I had playing all the big PSX games – that it was just effortlessly cool, and I was cool for playing them.
It also felt like the start of a brief period when there was absolute perfect synergy between graphics and gameplay, and the last time there was something entirely new in the graphical space, a total evolution of the medium.
If your company was a movie, it would be…?
Die Hard With a Vengeance. 2 guys coming together to solve problems, hoping nothing blows up in their faces. One is often hungover.