STUDIO PROFILE
AKUPARA GAMES
Helping others find success, from empowering modders to romancing Colonel Sanders
BY CALLUM BAINS
Naming your studio after a cosmic being takes some confidence. In Sanskrit, Akupara means ‘World Turtle’ – the celestial Hindu deity that, according to one Vedic story, holds a group of elephants and the Earth upon its back. This other Akupara, an indie developer-publisher based in California, doesn’t bear quite so much weight on its shoulders. Yet for founder and CEO David Logan there is something of a similarity between the slow and steady movement of the studio and that of its turtle mascot. Its origins, though? Less creation myth than shrewd pivot.
Logan’s first run at helming an indie studio was at the short-lived Night Light Interactive, set up after he’d spent several years working as a freelance producer. Its only release was 2014’s Whispering Willows – a horror-tinged puzzleplatformer that enjoyed a full development team and a largely indifferent publisher. “We felt like we got kind of stiffed,” says Logan, who wasn’t impressed by the publisher’s cookie-cutter marketing campaign and general lack of creativity. “It felt like it was just one of the titles in their slate that they were signing.”
Sales were meagre; critical attention was slim. Keen to avoid a similarly disappointing arrangement for their next project, the team went on to create Akupara. The idea was to blend in-house development with external publishing, bringing the expertise they had already picked up (and were now refining) to others’ indie projects. They would take on games about which they were passionate and to which they could provide dedicated marketing support. “But it was also,” Logan admits, “games that we could afford.” Funds were scarce, and after struggling to secure outside backing for their second project, the team resolved to self-finance everything. “I think I was just a bit mentally exhausted from pitching for financing,” Logan recalls. “I was like, ‘You know what, I’ve been a producer for three studios now, and I’ve probably launched 50 games and websites and apps. I know how to do it under budget. And I know how to work for hire’.”