And suddenly we can call ourselves game developers!

Who doesn’t know these innocent childhood dreams that you just can’t get out of your head. Things that impressed us back then don’t just go away over time and are responsible for the interests and hobbies we pursue as an adult. That could be a passion for cars, planes or a membership in the local voluntary fire department for example. For us, our biggest childhood dream has always been the development of video games and against all odds said wish got fulfilled in the beginning of January 2019. This is the story of the foundation of Oachkatzlschwoaf Interactive:

Once upon a time…

First things first. Our little story starts with two good friends going to a high school somewhere in Bavaria, Germany. Back then Daniel and I were spending a significant amount of our free time on playing video games like Starcraft II, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, Skyrim, Minecraft and many more. I guess we were just two examples of gamers that started imagining how it would be to be the ones developing games. Working on our own games and thereby fascinating thousands of players world wide became a dream. Sometime in eleventh grade, this dream animated us to start learning how to develop our very own games. Of course we did not forget about school and still put most of our effort in that, trust me!

Our first project was inspired by Minecraft but shouldn’t have that blocky look to it. Fun fact: Shortly after we had stopped our developing process as it got to complicated for us beginners, „Rust“ and „The Forest“ were released. Still we had a lot of fun with our little project and I even thought about studying 3D-Design at university for a while. Games had reached a state of being almost kinda mainstream in Germany but a career in the video game industry was not taken seriously by teachers and parents alike. If you were to talk about that kind of vision of your future you might as well have told them about your plan of wanting to be a sushi chef in Japan or something like that.

We decided to go with more reasonable majors to study at university but our dream lived on.

Our time at university

While Daniel studied computer science and I went for elementary school teaching we continued working on new projects (for example a strategy game played in first person perspective), acquired new skills and learned from the many mistakes we made.

In our strategy game „Clans in Conflict“ you could plan your city in first person perspective.

In a branched valley players would have to fight for supremecy

In summer 2017, Daniel began working on a base building game that was giving a lot of emphasis to the emotions of its colonists. After he had convinced me to join his cause, we worked until April 2018 on our game that we named Founders’ Fortune. We called ourselves Oachkatzlschwoaf Interactive to stress our Bavarian origin. Well, I guess I have to mention that Oachkatzlschwoaf is propably one of the most Bavarian words imaginable. We often make other Germans say it to get a laugh out of it. I wonder why?

With my final exams around the corner and Daniels semester abroad in Seattle, we had to stop working on Founders’ Fortune for a while. Naturally we couldn’t get it out of our heads so when we were about to graduate we decided to make our dream come true and take our chances as real video game developers. It was and still is so awesome to think about that!

Oachkatzlschwoaf Interactive

In Januar 2019 things finally got serious: With our degrees as potential plan B, we felt safe enough to take the step to founding our own company. We had spent the last month looking into the process of how to found a company in Germany and knew what we had to do and how much money we’d have to spent. Developing our game in one of our basements at home was not an option as there were too many possibilities for distraction. Especially our families, not being too happy with our plans to begin with, would keep us busy with daily tasks

In Ingolstadt, a city between München (Munich) and Nürnberg (Nuremberg), we found an office that, even though being way too big with 46 m², suited our needs pretty well.

To rent the place we first had to officially found our company so we sought out a notary and got a bank account for our company. I guess it’s not too hard to imagine the way these officials reacted to our rather uncommon plans. On top of that, hearing our company’s name has never failed to give people a good laugh so far. Of course we like that a lot, we’re part of the entertainment industry after all!

Now that we had our meeting with the notary and got added to the German commercial register it is official:

We are Oachkatzlschwoaf Interactive UG (haftungsbeschränkt) and we are developing video games!