After finishing university, Niklas Bothe and I had the dream to create our own video game. 2013 we started out in my living room, assembling a team and working on our first game - Grand Values: Monaco. A year later we officially founded Bearhands, our own studio and moved to a real office.
As the Creative Director, my vision for the game was an episodic, non-violent, light-hearted stealth adventure about a group of ragtag thieves. The Art Direction was colorful, wholesome and fresh and I'm very proud of the style we established, with very limited resources and well before Fortnite or Overwatch in sight.
The game focused on non-violent third person stealth gameplay with traversal and climbing elements. Our USP was a modular and cinematic stealing gameplay component emulating the thrill and tension of pickpocketing and stealing in high stakes situations.
Narratively we explored themes about privilege, loyalty in friendships as well as a satirical critique of late stage capitalism. To realise our vision we recorded several days in a motion capture studio, utilised face capturing and recorded 1000s of voice lines with professional voice actors.
"Bearhands Games wants each steal to feel like a scene from a movie and, going by this example, it's succeeded spectacularly." EDGE Magazine
Sadly this game was well overscoped and we never got to finish it. Even though, we had an alpha build running on Xbox One and Playstation 4, with around three hours for a full playthrough of the first episode, the game would have demanded so much more resources to get over the finish line.
Thank you to everyone who contributed, we punched well above our weight!
Below are some promo and work in progress shots.
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