Aldamami is Excited to Start The Rabbit

This year's The Rabbit starts on October 31. One of the participating teams is Aldamami, which was nominated for this year's DCP in the category Best Prototype. We talked to the four founders about their expectations of the extraordinary program.

On Thursday, The Rabbit 2024 begins, the month-long residency for independent game developers at Coconat in Brandenburg. After sifting through 93 applications, representing nearly 500 possible participants, the final selection has been made, and one of the teams is Aldamami from Berlin.

Aldamami was founded by David Cafisso, Katharina Müller, Marvin Braun and Alica Schneider. The four of them met at the Game Design Studio at the DE:HIVE at the HTW Berlin. Together they developed the prototype Bloodletter, which was nominated for this year's Deutscher Computerspielpreis (DCP; German Computer Games Award) in the category Best Prototype.

To mark the launch of The Rabbit, we asked the founders not only what their expectations are for the program, but also how the launch went for them as a young indie team and what support they received from official sources but also from industry colleagues. In line with the idea of community, they answered the questions as a team.

GamesMarkt: How and why did you decide to apply to participate in The Rabbit 2024?
Aldamami: We first became aware of this opportunity because of a LinkedIn post and saw it as a great opportunity to work in a highly focused environment, away from the distractions of our usual Berlin day to day. Since we are a very young company we also saw a lot of potential to strengthen our team bond as well as connect internationally with the other Rabbits and decided to apply because of this.

What are your expectations of the program and what are you particularly looking forward to?
We are expecting a creativity rich, productive work environment as well as opportunities to exchange experiences and knowledge with fellow rabbits as well as present mentors. We highly value the intercultural exchange made possible by the rabbit camp and hope to be able to incorporate more diverse points of view into our game design. Similarly we are looking forward to other great opportunities provided to us by the rabbit camp, particularly attending Games Ground and getting to pitch our game. We’re also excited to explore Brandenburg and find some calm in the beautiful nature surrounding rabbit camp.

You 'found' each other as a team while studying at the HTW Berlin. How exactly did the decision to form a company out of the project team come about?
After developing the prototype for Bloodletter we received really positive feedback from our fellow students and were motivated to pursue the project further. Our professors, Thomas Bremer and Susanne Brandhorst, recommended we apply for 'best prototype' for Deutscher Computerspielpreis, which we ended up getting nominated for. As we got the chance to work on different projects with different people between the prototype and DCP nomination we got to appreciate more how well we work as a team and how truly special Bloodletter is. Because of our passion for the project and the financial kickstart the DCP nomination gave us, we decided to form a company to bring Bloodletter to a full release.

Based on your experiences, what are the conditions for setting up an indie team in Germany or specifically in Berlin? How much support – not only financially – did you receive from public authorities?
Based on our experience the DE:HIVE cosmos is probably the best environment to found an indie studio in. As we are still students we still have the safety net of university to fall back on as well as our prototype since it originally was a semester project. Having a specific project that has already received positive reaction made the decision to form a company much easier. As for founding in Berlin, we were very lucky to be surrounded by more knowledgeable people than us. However we still found the whole process quite challenging. We quickly found out that founding a company costs quite some money in Germany as well as a lot of personal commitment. We also ran into some trouble understanding the juristic as well as tax language, so some expertise in this regard is needed. Overall there are a lot of great opportunities to get support in Berlin, however you will have to take care of getting that support yourself.

And how supportive were and are other, already established teams?
Since the DE:HIVE is filled with already established teams they were very supportive when they heard about our founding ambitions. Especially Toukana Interactie were kind enough to reach out, extend their support and lend their expertise on where to go after DCP. Other teams like Meander Interactive helped us with our application to the Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg. Overall we have received a great deal of support from other indie studios and feel like everyone in the DE:HIVE cosmos is more than happy to help and share what they have learned during their own journey, we are incredibly grateful for this.