Google invests R$1 million in Rockhead Studios, from the Tecnopuc community

THE Rockhead Studios received an investment of R$1 million from Google for the development of your games. THE contribution is from Google Play’s Indie Games Fund in Latin America, a bigtech program that seeks to assist in the production of games by independent Latin American studios on the Google platform.

THE Rockhead Studios is part of the Pucrs Science and Technology Park community (Tecnopuc), in Porto Alegre.

Of the hundreds of companies registered in the program, 10 studios were selected. “It was an extremely close contest because, fortunately, we have many high-quality independent game studios here”, celebrates Christian Lykawka, CEO of Rockhead.

A andThe company was founded at the end of 2010 and, shortly afterwards, incubated at Raiar – Tecnopuc’s former startup incubator.

THE Rockhead emerged as a startup in the era of free-to-play games (free) for cell phones and, in its trajectory, focused on developing the Starlit Adventures brand. These are games for cell phones and video game consoles with millions of downloads worldwide.

The brand also expanded to comic books and animation.

Lykawka says that they developed many games until arriving at the one that started the Starlit Adventures series, in 2015 – a game that took two years to produce and was an important milestone for the studio, serving as a basis for other games by establishing a universe and characters that were used in subsequent works. Rockhead’s most recent game was Starlit Kart Racing.

“The amount invested by Google is being directed to producing content ranging from improvements to already released games to the creation of Starlit Adventures 2which is the successor to the original, completing a 10-year cycle from the beginning of the series”, says the entrepreneur.

According to Lykawka, the Rockhead maintains a small development corebut connected to others who collaborate on projects.

“We involve professionals such as programmers, designers, artists, screenwriters, musicians, voice actors and many other areas to make games and animations. Each project requires a different team composition and they are quite multidisciplinary”, he explains.

This is not the first recognition achieved by the studio, which has already won national and international awards. “This confirms that we are on the right path: building successful products on the international market from solid foundations, like Tecnopuc”, adds the entrepreneur.

THE Rockhead is the second game company founded by Lykawka. The first was the Southlogic Studiosin 1996, incubated at CEI/UFRGS, and which was later acquired by Ubisoftin 2009. Ubisoft was also part of the Tecnopuc community, in a partnership that resulted in the first postgraduate course in digital games in Brazil, of which Lykawka was part of the teaching staff for many years.