IN DEVELOPMENT
Project: Hamster is a fun and whimsical 3D platformer currently in development by our indie team, Kip Tender Games. Players take on the role of a young scientist who, after a failed experiment, finds himself trapped in the tiny body of his beloved hamster, Victor Hamsterstein. Now, he must navigate a world far too big for him, solving puzzles and using clever mechanics to find a way back to his human self.
Summary of responsibilities
(Creative) Production:
Overall project & team management (Member onboarding, meetings, stand-ups, task division)
Documentation of developer’s wiki for the project (User testing guidelines, marketing research, game flow, etc.)
Supervising the Art and Design team and providing feedback on all fronts
Working alongside the Technical Producer to ensure progress in development (Version control, testing and feedback on mechanics, etc.)
(Lead) Environment Art:
Concepting visual storytelling for the level based on the designer’s greybox
Documenting style guides, tools, and references for the art team
Creating (stylized) organic and hard-surface props for the scene
(Creative) Production and Project Management
Project Management
As a producer, part of my role is to oversee task division and scrum. To do this, I work alongside the Technical Producer of the project, Kamila Matuszak (later referred to as Kama), and we work together on planning each milestone and sprint, running weekly meetings with the team, and reviewing tasks done by the team.
For our scrum, we use HacknPlan, as it gives us the ability to categorize and tag each task in detail. Additionally, the website allows us to mark each sprint and milestone, in addition to backlogs for the latter.
Team Management
Aside from task division and overall project management, I also handle the onboarding of team members, and provide regular check ups to see how they are doing both inside and outside of the project. In our team, we find it important that our team is motivated, doing well, and enjoying the work they do. Especially given that this indie project is volunteer based due to lack of funds at the moment, we encourage people to go at their own pace and take breaks if necessary.
Developer’s Wiki
As one of the creators of the game, I took the initiative to create a master-document of everything that new team members of any role would need to know. Some of these categories include: Studio & Team, Market research, Story, Mechanics, Art Guide, Tutorials and many more.
Members of each department generally help out with this document too, like Kama, who helped me document the mechanics correctly so that our gameplay programmer knows exactly what he needs to program by just reading this document.
Environment Art
Finalized Props (so far) & Artstyle
As we are only in the pre-production stage of our development, I have not made a lot of finalized assets for the project yet. However, I have made two published personal projects to develop the style that we would want to put into the game.
You can click either of the two images on the right to see them in more detail!
After developing these two items, I also created art style guides and provided the tools I used to create these objects within the Developer’s Wiki that you can see in the Production & Project Management section above.
Placeholder Assets
My tasks as an artist in the pre-production stage has primarily been to create high-fidelity placeholders of existing greyboxes for the assets which were created by the level designer. You can see an example of this on the left. I repeated this process for any important assets that the player may interact or collide with.
I would love to show you the whole level, but maybe we can save that reveal for later down the line ;)
Visual Storytelling & Concepting
After being given the level layout, flow, and 2D blockout, I created a 3D scene per level using existing assets to visualize the look and feel of the level better before we being creating assets for the environment. Whilst making these concepts, I also implemented visual storytelling elements within the scene, based on the story behind the game. Adding these elements into the level will immerse the player into the game, and we want to unlock the player’s curiosity about the main character’s backstory.
The image is pixelated for the time being to avoid spoilers about the level before any playtests occur.
Upcoming Plans
Demo
Our largest goal at hand is to complete a full, functioning demo of the game by July 2026. This demo will include the first level with high-fidelity assets, sounds, UI, and more.
To achieve this goal, my role in the team will be primarily focused on creating high quality polished assets. Alongside my position as an artist, I will continue leading the team and assist with conducting playtests with as many people as possible within our target audience.
Community
Our game is silly, whimsical, and the story has a lot of depth for the community to unravel. We want to build a community that can bond over the game. Additionally, we aim to build a community that is open to playtesting or investing into the project.
To build up this community, I aim to network with organizations that may help us promote our game and spread the word. We will work on a trailer that can be published at the Reality Check Festival 2026, alongside a community discord server for people to join. Additionally, I want to provide rewards for those who help kickstart our project through donations. The given rewards are not public yet, but they will be launched alongside our trailer at the festival.
Crowdfunding
A secondary goal to our team which is almost necessary to push our project further is crowdfunding. The funding will mainly be used for any marketing campaigns, publishing, and other business related expenses.
A lot of the steps that I am taking for crowdfunding go hand-in-hand with community-building, which you can read in the Community section.