Hello everyone!
We’ve been thrilled to see so much interest in Frostrail since last week’s announcement. Thank you for all the questions and comments, and keep them coming – we’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and will be writing to answer as many questions as we can in the coming weeks and months.
This week we wanted to help you get to know us a little better: You may have heard of FakeFish before, but what kind of people are there behind the name? Those who have been following us for a longer time through Barotrauma already know something about our team, but there are developers behind Frostrail who have not worked on Barotrauma, and vice versa. So we believe some introductions are in order.
FakeFish, the makers of Frostrail and Barotrauma
A picture from a few years back with almost half of the current team.
FakeFish is an independent game studio from Turku, Finland. Our journey started all the way back in 2014, when the team consisted of five university friends, but we only really made our mark when Barotrauma was released on Steam early access in 2019.
That same year was also when the idea for Frostrail began to take shape: it started as our lead designer Ez’s brainchild when he was traveling to his summer cottage along a particularly foggy and deserted highway through the forest, and daydreamed: "Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of truck simulator meets Silent Hill or something?". The daydream lingered, changing shape bit by bit and morphing from a truck game into a train game over the years, until the opportunity came to develop it further with a team.
Now that team is almost 30 strong – still a small company, but just about big enough to handle two separate game projects. Our people come from 8 different countries (most of us are Finnish though), and some have called FakeFish home for the entirety of their careers, while others have experience from several different video game companies. The Fish currently working on Frostrail are…
Design team
Ez, Daniel, Jeroen and Riina
Art team
Jonas, Dinh, Iiro, Mappu, Nam-Anh, Sampo and Tomi
Programming team
Sami, Eetu, Jaakko, Juan, Kasperi and Lauri
Audio and music
Jussi
Production and community management
Aku, Kalle and Vilma
You can find almost everyone from FakeFish in the official Discord server, albeit with our Discord nicknames, as well as members of the publishing team at Shiro. Come say hi!
Some more of us up to no good last November.