Hanging from the curved ceiling of the old town hall in Brno in the Czech Republic, is the preserved body of a dragon. The beast was said to have terrorised the inhabitants of the city centuries ago, until it was poisoned by a brave butcher. This area of the country is synonymous with myths and monsters. Ivan Mládek’s popular song Jožin z bažin tells of a swamp creature from Moravia – the lush region of which Brno is the largest city – travelling to nearby Prague to eat its tourists. But that was just a song, and the monster hanging by chains in the town hall is actually a crocodile – probably a gift from a visiting king in the 17th century. The myths and legends, however, live on.

Venture beyond the city, into the surrounding forests, and you’ll often find Jakub Dvorský, founder of game development studio Amanita Design, exploring and foraging with his young family. It is here, where many of the city’s folk tales originated, that Dvorský draws his inspiration. Born in the region and a nature lover, he now brings his two small children out to pick mushrooms and wild fruits, to spot animals or to stargaze long into the night. He talks about investigating nature at every level, from microbes to landscapes, to the universe beyond Earth.

Dvorský pipes every scrap of information he learns into his video games. They play out like fairytales of microbiology, following tiny creatures into subterranean cities populated by woodlice and lazy beetles, operating plant-like machinery to solve wordless puzzles. This can be seen across the still-evolving Samorost series, surreal point-and-click adventure games – about a space gnome and the planets he visits – and the standalone title Botanicula, which saw five adorable friends saving their tree from nasty parasites.

The exception is Machinarium, yet another adventure game this time about a robot saving his friends from a band of criminals. But even that game’s rusted metal city has a similar organic quality: a tangled metropolis of crawlspaces and staircases, the interiors arranged like snail shell patterns, the clusters of spires like an autumn thistle. These games are populated by insects or insect-like beings; they are swathed in the magic that Dvorský sees when he holds a zoom lens to a tree knot.

It would be a clever thing from the state to support the games industry, but our politicians are not very smart people Jakub Dvorský

This passion has been rewarded over the years, too. Not only has Amanita been recognised by the BBC and Nike, making small games for each of them, the studio has picked up multiple awards from bodies such as Indiecade and the Independent Game Festival. The success of 2008’s Machinarium, the studio’s first big game production, springboarded it into financial independence allowing the team to pursue a multi-project structure.

Founded in 2003, Amanita began as Dvorský’s theses project while studying Animation Film at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. It has since expanded. Six people and an external sound engineer are working on Samorost 3, and there are three other small teams working on their own projects – all sharing a fascination with nature and ecology. Dvorský oversees all production but he believes in the concept of the auteur, and so each team is led by its own creative director.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Even sound effects are produced using natural materials. Photograph: Amanita Design

It’s an approach taken from his education in Prague, where he studied animated film, sometimes under the wing of Czech stop-motion animator Jiří Barta. It was here that Dvorský established a connection with the Czech-Slovak surrealist group that Barta mingled with in earlier decades. Some Czech artists of Amanita’s generation hold disdain for their parents and their cohorts for collaborating with the communist regime that oversaw Czechoslovakia until 1989. However, Dvorský feels a connection with how the Czech surrealists and other eastern European artists operated clandestinely, circulating their artistic critiques of the regime as samizdat.

The politics of the era may not have transposed to the work of Amanita Design, but the acquired skills and thematic interests – puppetry, bucolic stories, fairytales, and Švankmajer’s notion of tactile art – certainly have. Every member of Amanita Design has an academic degree, specialising in either visual or audio artistry. For Samorost 3, Dvorský works closely with painter Adolf Lachman and animator Vaclav Blín, while the sound production team consists of Tomáš “Pif” Dvořák and the musician Tomáš “Floex” Dvořák.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Character sketches from Amanita’s Samorost series. Photograph: Amanita Design

Also passed on through this lineage, if only intuitively, is the importance of having the mentality of a collective, which is necessary to any underground group’s survival. Dvorský describes the studio as a “free gathering of friends,” even though most of them work from home in separate cities, and only a few ever attend the official Amanita offices; a cosy apartment in the middle of Prague with three rooms and a kitchen. Some may lunch together in the week, but most spend as much time as possible with their families, and there is only one annual get-together, which is typically held during the summer at Dvorský’s countryside cottage.

Czechoslovakia used to be an animation superpower. I hope Amanita and others can continue that great tradition Jakub Dvorský

Where Amanita’s collective mentality exists is in its support of local organisations: the team sends money to ecological groups that fight for wilderness conservation, but also helps the local game development scene through consulting, conferences, and talent recruitment. Dvorský says he does this as higher forces in the Czech Republic won’t. “I really doubt anything will change in this regard in the near future,” he says. “It would be a clever thing from the state to support the games industry, especially young creative studios and individuals, but our politicians are not very smart people and the games lobby is weak if not existent.”

Dvorský mentions that there is one grant from the EU available to Czech video game talent, “but it’s difficult to fulfil all the requirements and it’s available only to already established companies, so it’s useless for young indie developers”. He hopes that if Samorost 3, due out later this year, is a success it could lead to the wider recognition and prosperity of Czech culture and arts.

“Czechoslovakia used to be an animated film superpower, which is not true any more, but I hope Amanita and other Czech indie studios have a chance at continuing that great tradition,” he says. Dvorský also adds that, unlike the short films Czechoslovakia has become known for, video games have more chance of generating income. And, while other Czech game companies (Bohemia Interactive, Keen Software, Madfinger Games) have developed westernised approaches to design, Amanita has proven that none of the country’s home-grown influences, its pastoral landscapes or its surreal animated films, need be eschewed to achieve global recognition.