Patrick Merklee
In The Snow Studios: Building an Indie Game Studio
About Me
Hello everyone, I’m Patrick Merklee! I am a senior Interactive Multimedia major with a focus in Game Development and Design. I was the president of TCNJ’s Game Design Club for the past 3 years and have taken every game course that was offered during my time at TCNJ. I was also a Teaching Assistant for both Games courses during my senior year to learn and gain more experience in the field. I have always had an interest in making games ever since my childhood, so actually being able to make and release projects I’m proud of has been a dream come true.
Together with my friends, we are working on making an Independent Game Studio to make unique experiences for people to enjoy. I am the CEO of our company, and with that role I am aiming to expand our brand by searching for new opportunities to share our work. We are making all of our projects in the Unity Engine.
Mason and Strings
Mason and Strings started out as a semester-long group game project in Josh Fishburn’s IMM 460: Games II Implementation course. I was the lead programmer and level designer on this project. Throughout the course we received a lot of valuable feedback on how to improve our game. After the final, Professor Fishburn encouraged us to pursue the project further. So I made a trailer and we submitted an application to the TooManyGames Indie Game Showcase on whim. To our surprise, we were accepted and brought on a couple more of our friends to help polish up the game for the showcase.
We released Mason and Strings on Steam on December 10th, 2021. You can download the game for free here.
TooManyGames Indie Game Showcase
We attended TooManyGames 2021 in October as part of the Indie Game Showcase to debut our first title, Mason and Strings. In preparation, we got a cardboard cutout, a banner, T-Shirts, and printed a multitude of stickers to give out to anyone that played our demo. This was the first public event where we presented as In The Snow Studios. I handled most of the preparations for the event and our whole team made sure our demo was ready for showcase.
Throughout the weekend-long show, we had hundreds of attendees try our game and networked with the other dozen developers who were presenting at the show. We made many on the spot fixes and learned a lot as the days went on. We were then able to use the feedback and experience from this event to polish and release the game on Steam in December.
We will be back at TooManyGames in June to showcase our next project as well. You can see who else will be attending here.
The Newton Mystery
We are now working on our next title, The Newton Mystery. I am a programmer and level designer on this project. I focus mostly on the level programming and some UI elements. I programmed Coal’s character controller, most in-level puzzles, our title cards, and collaborated with my teammates on many other elements. We have grown a lot over the past year, and we are putting everything we have into this next project.
For this project, I have also had a heavy focus on promotion and branding. I created and edited the trailer for this game, which you can view here. I have also been seeking out new opportunities to showcase and preparing new material to continue expanding the reach of our titles.
In The Snow Direct
I have also put together a video presentation to present everything my studio and I have accomplished over the past year in a fun and digestible format. We also feature a few of our other friends’ thesis games here as well. It was a lot of fun to create, so I hope you enjoy!
