Stellar Door Studio is a small team of aspiring game developers based in Frederick, MD.
The Mission
As three people who would all love to call ourselves artists of various sorts, we are driven by projects that center on the imaginative – visually, sonically, and, most importantly, interactively. Our guiding belief is that games are both worlds to be experienced, and stories to be felt as much as told.
To discover and create these kinds of worlds and stories, we choose projects that help to develop our crafts as artists, animators, composers, programmers, and most of all storytellers, in the hope that every aspect of our games will feel like one complete and cohesive experience – a vivid dream, or nightmare, that might linger on in the player’s imagination even after the game itself is finished.
With that goal at heart, we continue to work on small, creative projects, hoping that both the journey and the final products might ultimately capture—and free—our own imaginations along the way.
The Details
Stellar Door Studios is based in Frederick, MD. (And while we don’t have anything quite so official as an actual office, we do have Adam’s living room, which has gotten us this far.)
We are a core team of three, although we have a great many wonderful friends that we’ve worked with on past projects, including some of the games listed in the Projects section here. While this doesn’t mean a whole lot of staffing power, we’re proud of the workflows we’ve learned together, and have come to rely on one another to fill in the gaps that fast-paced projects can often create. It also helps that none of us probably sleeps quite enough.
We do focus on our own long-term projects, but we have come to love and look forward to as many gamedev (and recently film) events and contests as we have the time for — with a special shout out to the excellent Ludum Dare team jam as a favorite way to try out new ideas and new tools. Our team met through Ludum Dare, and has come to solidify a core division of labor based on the jams we’ve completed together in the past.
We also recently competed in the wonderful 72 Film Fest, producing a 6.5min animated film in 72 hours called Bound, which we are proud to say won the Best Amateur Film award, and was nominated for Best of the Fest, as well as nominations for overall Best Lighting and Best Cinematography.
The Plan
While none of us are quite able to work on games full-time, Stellar Door maintains ongoing long-term game development projects, which we’d love to share info about here when we can. If you’re interested in following along with the development, or just staying in communication about the tools and techniques we’re learning and practicing, check out our Devblog, which we promise to update as often as we stop forgetting that social media is a thing.
Stay in Touch
If you have any questions, thoughts to share, or even opportunities to work together, please let us know in the Contact section.
