Announcing Astra’s
2022 Fellows
Each year we provide a cohort of promising thinking game developers one year patron grants to support their work. These ambitious creators are the future of thinking games.
Zuzanna
Zaród
Zuzanna is an independent game developer and visual artist. She has been creating small projects since her teenage years. Her latest puzzle game, Bunny’s Flowers, showed off her unique style and helped define her goal - creating wholesome, welcoming worlds filled with intriguing challenges and colorful characters. With her accessible games Zuza hopes to encourage more players to become interested in the genre. She is always working on new prototypes, looking for ways to improve herself as a designer and storyteller.
Carlos
Pedroso
Carlos Pedroso is a game developer from Portugal. He began making games when he was 12 years old and quickly realized that he wanted to make games for everyone to enjoy. With 7 games released, his interest is mainly in the puzzle genre, trying always to make every game feel special and interesting. He loves the community side of game development and enjoys playing other people’s games. Now, with a degree in Games and Multimedia, he is developing and releasing small puzzle games hoping everybody has fun with them!
James
Kay
James is a PhD engineer whose work spans a broad spectrum of engineering and design projects, ranging from aerospace materials to design of industrial equipment to architectural hardware and designer consumer products. His best known designs are the award-winning architectural hardware and kitchenware products under the Tantalus Design brand. He has also taught courses on engineering design at Capilano University in Vancouver. A lifelong fan of the puzzle game genre, he is now adding video game design to his repertoire.
Kate
Killick
Kate is an independent game creator who is rediscovering her passion for exploring creative, personal games after a decade of working for mobile startups and agencies. She released her first solo project Anxietyware in April 2021 and is now seeing where her curiosity takes her. Her past credits include BAFTA-winning game Mush, App of the Year 2016 Hopster and Ready Chef Go, a Snap Game played by over 75 million people.
Ali
Nikkhah
As long as he remembers, Ali has wanted to be an artist. He tried his hand at all kinds of artistic media as a teen and finally decided to stick with games, both for the vast space of unexplored and undiscovered possibilities they offer, and their ability to incorporate so many other artistic disciplines. His early attempts at making a puzzle game culminated in the release of the PuzzleScript game Vertebrae, which he intends to remake into a standalone game. Apart from games and other art forms, his sources for inspiration include math, science, and languages.
Michael
Kamm
Michael is a game developer who has worked on dozens of game jams and experimental projects over the past 2.5 years. Through this experience, he has cultivated an interest in many aspects of game development, such as sound design and visual design. This desire to learn inspires him to make games with novel interactions and games founded on real-world systems. He is currently developing his puzzle game, Splines ‘n Shapes, from a Ludum Dare project into his first full release. Before pursuing this passion, he worked for five years as a software engineer.
Andrew
Huff
When Andrew was four years old, he accidentally opened the source code for a game he was playing on his dad's MS-DOS computer. Confused, he deleted it all, annihilating the game forever. Andrew likes to think he has gotten better at making games since then. Over 40 games in an eclectic mix of genres and styles can be played on his itch page; he recommends Chicken Chicken Crocodisles and Inbox Unbox in particular.
Rocío
Tomé
Rocío 'Rothio' Tomé is a self-taught programmer that has worked in gamedev for over 5 years. She released several solo-developed projects like mk creature.zip, an award-winning puzzle game. She has been prototyping games that explore asymmetrical communication in her Twitch channel and released StreamINK, a moddable collective interactive fiction game played on live streams. She is co-founder of FemDevs, and a regular speaker at technological events. Her next prototypes will focus on the analysis of problem-solving strategies involving communication within large communities.
2021 Fellows
Sabrina
Culyba
Sabrina has been creating games and game-like experiences for over 15 years. She specializes in designing games to transform players including educational games, behavior-change games, and social impact games. She is the author of the book The Transformational Framework (2018), and co-designer of the family board game Yarrr Har Hunt (2020), published by Peaceable Kingdom. Sabrina makes games and provides game design consultation through her independent studio, Ludoliminal.
Marcos Donnantuoni
Marcos has been developing games for 15 years both professionally and for personal projects. An early love for designing board games is evident in his minimalist and elegant design style. He is passionate about exploring the puzzle game genre and has a “wild dream” to find a truly unexplored territory in the space of all possible puzzles, and "mine" some truly original games from it. He has released 21 puzzle games on itch.io over the last several years.
Jord
Farrell
Jord is an independent game developer and artist. Over the past 10 years, he has released 100+ games onto the internet. He publishes a new art piece every single day, 583 in a row as of writing. Over the years, he has refined his artistic talent to create very cerebral experiences that try to illustrate the things he finds important in life. Life, death, love, nature.
Gwen
Frey
Gwen has over 12 years of experience working on blockbuster titles such as BioShock Infinite and on indie video game hits such as The Flame in The Flood. She recently founded her own independent studio, Chump Squad, where she crafted the critically acclaimed puzzler Kine. Building on that modest success she is now growing her studio, and leading a tiny indie team on a larger, more experimental narrative puzzler, Lab Rat.
Chaim
Gingold
Chaim is a designer and theorist who creates and studies powerful representations for playing with, learning about, and reshaping the world. He created an interactive science book made of toys that simulates processes of Earth called Earth: A Primer (2015), and was the design lead for the Spore Creature Creator (2008). His design expertise and research interests encompass games, play, simulations, authoring tools, cities, and the history of technology. His work has been featured by WIRED, CNN, Apple, and the New York Times. His forthcoming book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine will be published by MIT Press.
Jason
Newman
Jason has been making games for friends since childhood, starting with sidewalk chalk adventure games and Zelda-inspired role playing. Over time he created pencil and paper games, D&D campaigns, and video games with RPG Maker, Warcraft III World Editor, and Game Maker. After earning a degree in CS, he began development on Akurra while applying to engineering jobs. However his community was so excited about the game that he dedicated himself to full time game development. Now Akurra is his proudest achievement! The game has been well received by a wide audience and Jason is ecstatic at the prospect of something he created having a positive impact on people.
Luis Díaz
Peralta
Luis (Ludipe) is a freelance game designer interested in all sorts of projects. His portfolio includes work for clients as well as indie games such as Bleep Bloop, Missing Translation, and A Place for the Unwilling. He is currently making Sushi For Robots, a puzzle game about optimizing conveyor belts to feed robots, but that won't stop him from joining too many jams and releasing small free games every year. He is also involved in many community events and initiatives within the gamedev community.
Lucas Lerín
Salafranca
Lucas (Le Slo) is a Spanish game designer and multidisciplinary artist. After obtaining a degree in math, he released 21 games on itch.io over the last 4 years, the majority of them puzzle games. He loves designing puzzle games for their ability to inspire curiosity in players, and his dream magnum opus is an experience where the player clicks a button and is taken to a video game from an alien civilization. He is highly active and respected in the puzzle community and regularly collaborates with Gwen Frey and the Thinky Puzzle Collective.