SUBOTRON arcademy:

“Gibbon” – A Post Mortem beyond the Numbers

Location: IG Architektur, Gumpendorfer Str. 63B, 1060 Vienna

Felix Bohatsch
CEO Broken Rules

“Gibbon: Beyond the Trees” is a hopeful ecological adventure about the beauty of wilderness and the destructive force of civilisation. It was initially released in February 2022 on Apple Arcade, and later on Steam, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation.
“Gibbon” is the largest game we have ever created. Developed by an international team of up to 14 people, it took three years to complete (plus another year for porting it to consoles), with the core team based in Broken Rules’ office in Vienna. It was also the first game we developed with an external producer, Apple. During development, we had to overcome financial uncertainty, a lack of knowledge about gibbons and their habitat in Southeast Asia, a challenging movement system and the need for optimal performance on a wide range of devices. In this talk, you will learn about how we overcame these and other challenges, as well as getting a sneak peek into how Wobblersound brought our jungles to life with music and sound effects.

Supporting Act:

David & Markus Zahradnicek
Co-Founders Wobblersound

Wobblersound is a game-audio studio based in Vienna. Here we create music, sound design and audio implementation for games and experimental projects. For Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, we worked on Sound Design & Audio Implementation. The development of the game happening in the middle of the Covid-Pandemic, we had to re-create an audible rainforest in Vienna. The wonderful music in Gibbon is by scntfc (Andrew Rohrmann).

Biographies

Indie at his heart, Felix Bohatsch co-founded Broken Rules right after finishing his studies. He loves to create games that touch people all around the world and linger on in the minds of the players, long after the device has been put down. The last game he co-created was Apple Design Award winner “Gibbon: Beyond the Trees”. Before, he co-directed critically acclaimed “Old Man’s Journey”.

David & Markus Zahradnicek have been working together since their childhood and played in various bands together. After studying informatics & working as a game developer for several years, David Zahradnicek started to immerse himself more and more into the field of sound design and interactive audio. Markus Zahradnicek composed and performed as a musician for almost a decade. Then he decided to dig deeper into music production, and worked in the industry as an instrumentalist, singer and mixing engineer.