Game on! for Indoor Astronaut
ETH spin-off Indoor Astronaut specialises in the development of computer games. Unrailed! is their first game and is designed to entice all existing and future railway fans. The team has collected several prizes for their game worldwide.
An interview with Hendrik Baatz and Thomas Wolf, co-founders of Indoor Astronaut.
Hendrik and Thomas, how did your start-up come about and why the name “Indoor Astronaut”?
We met at ETH on a course called “Game Programming Lab” (GPL). Since Swiss railway and banking pioneer Alfred Escher’s 200th birthday was coming up in 2019, the task was to build a game with a related theme, which inspired us to focus on trains.
At the end of the course, we received a lot of positive feedback for the game, so we considered commercialising it. Soon after, we founded our company, Indoor Astronaut. For the distribution of the game, we currently have contracts with two publishers. With a pilot phase of more than a year, we continually enhanced the game to the full version, which we’ve just released. Moreover, there are now also versions for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 game consoles, soon to be followed by a version for Xbox One.
The name “Indoor Astronaut” is a metaphor for people who play video games because, although they are at home, they can immerse themselves into new universes.
Who is your typical game player, and where can we find the biggest railway fans?
Unrailed! is played by a wide audience. It is about building train tracks and guiding a moving train to its destination as quickly and safely as possible through continuously changing, so-called procedurally generated virtual worlds. It can be played alone or in a group of up to four players consisting of friends, family members or players you meet on the gaming platform. There is a large community for Unrailed! on Discord (online service for instant messaging, voice and video conferencing), where people exchange ideas and make appointments to play the game.
Our userbase of more than 400k individual players is evenly distributed across North America, Asia and Europe.
What is the underlying technology and what else does it take these days to launch a game successfully?
We developed our own game engine (a software foundation that implements basic tasks such as control, graphics and the online multiplayer mode) based on MonoGame/FNA, which gave us a lot of control and enabled us to add new features quickly.
For a successful game, you need an innovative idea, suitable partners for commercialisation and, finally, a good understanding of and connection to the community. The latter helped us to iteratively shape our game to meet the needs of our users during our pilot phase. Also, with the help of the community, we could find and fix bugs and errors very quickly.
What are your plans for the future and what are the next steps for Indoor Astronaut?
While we would be happy to create a second game, we’re also considering developing interactive applications on behalf of companies who want to engage their employees or customers more. Not only did we gain extensive technical knowledge, but we also learned to build our project together with our customers from the start and to keep it alive. We think we can transfer this knowledge to other areas and don’t necessarily want to focus solely on games in the future. For this reason, we’re looking for potential partners and investors.
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ETH spin-offs: facts and figures
Since 1996, 437 spin-offs have been founded at ETH Zurich. ETH transfer, the technology transfer office at ETH Zurich, supports recognized ETH spin-offs in the founding process and in their first years of operation.
With the help of the Pioneer Fellowship Programme, funded by the ETH Foundation, young researchers can develop innovative products and services based on their scientific work at ETH Zurich. A Pioneer Fellowship is awarded to young ETH entrepreneurial minds intending to develop a highly innovative product or service to be exploited commercially and/or for the benefit of society.