A Short History

The game 'Still Here' is the creation of David Smit, who was at the time still mainly creating art for games and huge advertisement-campaigns. He currently lives and works as a gamedeveloper in Berlin but at the time he spend his days traveling and working at various places including Crytek Budapest and at Guerrilla games for Killzone 2 in his country of origin: The Netherlands.

David Smit, game-developer 

The world of Still Here looks like a happy one full of nature and careless creatures called 'Pip'. His plan wasn't necessarily to create a game, but to create a world or IP that would be very suitable for gameplay ideas. You can find early sketches of the world on his portfolio and I really recommend taking a peak for your own viewing pleasure. Proofing he has more talent for creating art then coming up with names David named his project 'HippiePippiePocalypse'.

Artwork for 'HippiePippiePocalypse', check out more on David's portfolio.

David left for other jobs his world-building project never left him which is why he decided to iterate on it whenever he had time. Focus shifted from the human inhabitants of the world to small robot-like creatures called 'Pip'. You can find some of his early 'Pip World' sketches on his Instagram as as well as the aforementioned portfolio.

Still Here started as a world building project called Pip World.

Being the independent free spirit he is, David left is his gig at King where he was a lead artist to start learning how to code games. He started to develop a game on the premisse of a post-apocolyptic dystopian world filled with innocent creatures who seem to be oblivious to the disasters that had shaped their surroundings which seem to have been abandoned by human beings.

Very early version of Still Here with flight gameplay.

David learned how to code in C# using Unity and started developing multiple prototypes of Pip-games as a means to immerse an audience in the world of the Pip. The prototypes were interesting showcases yet somehow still lacked the qualities of the kind finished product David envisioned. His main goal was not just to create a game based on the Pip's world but also to preserve the artistic quality of the artwork in the game: something we don't see very often in mobile games.

Early version of Pipworld based building game.

We'll share more stories about Still Here's development in future updates on this blog! Did you ever work on a passion project and what was that like? Please tell us! We're also curious about what you think of the Pipworld and David's story in the comments below.