From Indie to AAA – Every issue, we portray one studio from the German-speaking development scene. This time: Slime King Games from Hamburg. To commemorate the release of Under the Island, we unlock the studio portrait for everyone.
After working in games for many years, Johannes and Simone Grünewald founded Slime King Games in 2020. Although one interpretation is that the Slime King is the biggest of the little ones, there is no deeper meaning behind the studio's name, apart from a certain affinity for slime enemies in RPGs, explains Johannes Grünewald. As an artist and animator by profession, and formerly at Daedalic Entertainment, he worked on many titles, primarily on animation and special effects for the Deponia series. After working at Goodgame, Bigpoint, InnoGames and Sviper/Threaks, he became senior artist.
"I worked as an animator and 2D artist in various studios here in Hamburg for many years. Unfortunately, none of the studios developed games that I wanted to make. My goal was to create culturally significant works, rather than just developing 'products' like most studios", he says. "Simone and I met at Daedalic and got married a few years later, which inevitably made her a part of Slime King Games," he laughs. "She was still at Daedalic when I started with the first prototypes." Simone Grünewald is an artist and art director who has been responsible for the art direction, character design and art layouts for the entire Deponia series, while overseeing most of the art production as Head of Art at Daedalic since 2009. "While Johannes tried out other studios, I was still at Daedalic and eventually left during the development of A Year of Rain because it no longer fit with my family situation. After about ten years, it was also time for something new," Simone tells us. "At Daedalic, I was most involved in visualizing worlds and finding styles. Initially, the project just piqued my curiosity, and I had the desire to contribute to this game world, which I did here and there with concept art. I became firmly committed to it after I left Daedalic to pursue my own projects."
"Video games are more than just a pastime and should be culturally recognized, as are other media." - Johannes Grünewald
Both love the initial phase of new projects, and their first joint game is called Under the Island (read our review here). It attempts to capture the feeling of childhood wonder and 90s Saturday morning cartoons as a player-driven adventure RPG. Their project is fully self-funded. "Unfortunately, we couldn't receive any funding because the project was already too far along when federal funding became available," says Johannes Grünewald. "Simone and I are the only permanent employees, but we work with several freelancers. If everything goes smoothly, we can grow with the next game." This increase in staff is necessary to shorten the development time to be competitive, as the game has been in development for around six years. The two are backed by US publisher Top Hat Studios. The starting point for the contact was Johannes Grünewald's progress reports on Twitter/X over the past few years. "This has attracted the attention of publishers several times. We've had conversations with them from time to time, but somehow things never quite clicked." With Top Hat it was different. After an email and initial discussions, the deal was quickly closed.
Slime King has been established in Hamburg. "Nevertheless, overall, I consider Hamburg to be a very good location for creating games," he said. "Hamburg has a wide pool of very talented game developers and artists, which is already a great help." He highlights the Indie Treff as a meeting place for indie developers and Gamecity Hamburg with its funding programmes. "However, there is still room for improvement; for example, funding pots in other federal states are often higher." The situation for game devs in Germany is already quite difficult, he says. "The costs are enormous, and there is a lot of bureaucracy. It's also very unfortunate that our work is still very little appreciated in society. Video games are more than just a pastime and should be culturally recognized, as are other media." In other countries, this is very different. There is a much bigger culture of video game creation in Poland, England or even better Japan, he states. "I would be pleased if we, as Slime King Games, could contribute positively to this culture in Germany. However, I actually see many positive trends in recent years. It also pleased me a lot that Chained Echoes and Signalis not only won the DCP but also received international recognition."
