Press Kit

The Company

Code Handwerker GmbH is a game development company based in Hartkirchen, Austria, in the rural outskirts of Linz. It was founded in early 2017 by Helmut Rubasch.

Contact information:
email: contact@codehandwerker.com
twitter: https://twitter.com/Code_Handwerker
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CodeHandwerker

Press Releases

Press Release for Rusty Quest

Press Release for Triangle Flip

The Team and some History

We are currently a team of one: Helmut Rubasch.

Helmut designs our games, does the coding, paints the graphics  and uses his adorable little Akai LPK 25 to do music and sound effects. If you don’t like what you get, you know who is to blame.

Helmut is also good at making good coffee for his team.

Just like most people who ended up writing software as a profession, Helmut started doing this as a little boy at age 9, and of course he was writing games (what did you expect). After he found out how to use sin() and cos() to his own advantage (circles ftw!) at the innocent age of 11, there was no holding back. He knew, that his preferred carreer just changed from “something with lasers” to “something with computers”.

While studying computer sciences, Helmut already wrote two games for a company during internships, but then went off to build enterprise software.

Now he is back in the gaming business. He started off with a sole proprietorship and now decided it was time to incorporate a GmbH.

Rusty Quest

After publishing a small iOS game, which didn’t really catch on, Helmut decided it was time for something bigger – he just didn’t know what it was.

He had some ideas, he knew what kind of games he liked and wanted to play, but it took a long time and a few pivots (based on early user feedback) to finish a game based on these ideas.

For example, while early versions were more focused on the player building machines and equipping them with weapons, and using those machines to fight off enemies, it turned out, that 2D platformers are not much fun when the player’s machine can’t jump or climb (d’oh!). Time for a major pivot. That’s when the player became an astronaut-like character (astronauts are well known for their agility and the innate need to climb ladders and ropes), and the player gets different cars/tanks/machines as extras to use in different levels.

Along the way, Helmut learned how to draw with Photoshop, how to record sound effects and background music, and how to adapt an open source 2D graphics engine to do fluid 3D graphics.

So after a few years of designing and coding and testing and pivoting, in late April 2017 Rusty Quest was finally ready to be released.

Have a look here for more game info, videos and images!

Triangle Flip

The company’s second game was supposed to be quite different: the ambitious goal was to release it within a few weeks!

So this means: no complex 3D graphics, no fancy sound track, no extra weapons and no handcrafted levels.

Which leads us to: simple graphics (our marketing likes to call it “minimalistic”), nice (but not too many) sound effects, a simple game and procedural level generation.

While doing thorough research (i.e. playing competitor’s games), Helmut had an epiphany – and the basic idea for what should soon become Triangle Flip.

Why triangles? Because triangles are everywhere nowadays, and they look really nice if you put them next to each other in different colors. And if you put some triangles together in a nice way, you get – you guessed it – another triangle!

Of course the game needed a nice touch interface, so that’s either touching every single triangle or swiping across rows of triangles. Swiping seemed a lot more interesting (from a haptical point of view). It seemed only logical, that swiping a row of triangles changes their colors. And that the player’s goal was to make all triangles the same color to complete a level.

And how do you make levels harder and more complicated? Well, just give the player more triangles! Simple, isn’t it?

Triangle Flip was born.

After a few weeks of building upon these ideas (and even doing much totally unrelated stuff), Triangle Flip was ready for prime time.

Have a look here for more game info, videos and images!