Meet the Hubbers: Hurricane Studio

Among the various startups that are part of our ecosystem, there is Hurricane Studio, a young studio founded in Lugano in 2022 by Diego Blank, Lena Kraus, and Theo Blank.

With their creativity and passion, they develop high-quality indie video games that go beyond entertainment.

Their mission is to create games that educate and inspire, turning fun into an opportunity to reflect on important issues such as sustainable development and environmental responsibility.

Hi! Can you tell us about Hurricane Studio and the people behind it?

We are a small indie game development start-up established in early 2022, based in Lugano. We started with the ambitions of entering the ever-growing indie video game market by making high quality & unique commercial and educational video games.

Our team consists of 3 co-founders, each with their unique role in game development: Theo Blank, our 3D artist and animator; Diego Blank, our programmer; and Lena Kraus, our UI/UX designer and music composer.

Currently, we are looking to expand our team via internships, and we are very happy to introduce Pietro Roda as the newest intern that recently joined our team. 

Can you tell us about your entrepreneurial journey? Where you started, where you are now, and the main challenges you’ve faced along the way?

Our first couple commercial games saw limited success, but after updates and learning from our mistakes, our mobile game “Chomper” started gaining traction; leading to over 150,000 downloads.

Nevertheless, during the last 3 years we received additional funds via an investor, which also gave us an exciting opportunity to partake in the ever-emerging field of game-based learning, where a project was conceptualized to create an educational video game about sustainable development to be played in classrooms and at home.

Our future plans are to continue to create high quality & unique commercial games and to use that experience to help grow the emerging game-based learning market via educational games. There is still a long road ahead with numerous challenges and road blocks, but the potential to use games as an educational tool has been an exciting research proposition seen throughout several years.

What positive impact do you want to have (globally, in Switzerland, in Ticino)? How are you achieving it concretely?

Our core mission is to make games that not only inspire others to use their creativity to

do the same, but use the art of video games as a tool to help people learn, explore

important topics, and make a positive impact on their surrounding community.

At Hurricane Studio, we want our games to make a positive impact, while being fun and

unique. Our dual approach of commercial and educational games allows us to operate

as a for-profit organization while contributing to a positive impact by:

• creation of educational video games

• open-source sharing of our data to help promote research on game-based

  learning

• helping grow the video game market in Switzerland, in particular the region of

  Ticino.

• creating job opportunities in the IT, creative, and administrative fields.

What made you choose Impact Hub Ticino as the place for your activities? What value does it bring you?

We wanted to look for a space where we could not only have an office space to work together, but a space that allowed for greater community building, network and a sense of belonging. Impact Hub has demonstrated to be a great place to achieve those goals, and has helped us make good connections, friendships and be a place that is enjoyable to partake in.

In the upcoming years, we plan to collaborate with Impact Hub in setting up testing sessions with our games to help gather feedback and general opinions about the game development process. There is also the possibility of creating workshops to share our experience in game development for others who are on the same path, or are interested to learn more about the game development world.

More info here: https://www.hurricanestudio.ch/