Ganymede Games, an indie game development studio based in Las Cruces, recently made a big move — renaming its flagship product just months ahead of its planned full release.
Previously called Xenotheria, Ganymede announced it changed its inaugural game's name to Dark Sky on March 4. The independent studio, which moved to Southern New Mexico's largest city in early 2019, made the naming decision for a few reasons, its CEO Jerry Prochazka told New Mexico Inno.
One of the reasons was the pronunciation of the name itself. Prochazka said the studio found many people would mispronounce Xenotheria, or find the name hard to say in general.
Rob Thompson, Ganymede's chief operating officer, echoed that reasoning in a March 4 post on the game distribution site Steam, writing, "While we loved the uniqueness of the name Xenotheria, it was often mispronounced and misspelled."
"Over time, we grew attached to it, much like you did, but it was still in the back of our minds that we needed to change it before launching," Thompson's post continued.
The studio's character artist suggested the name Dark Sky after "months of brainstorming," Thompson explained in the post, and after doing more research around the name, Ganymede decided it sounded "like a good build for our [intellectual property]," CEO Prochazka said.
Dark Sky, Ganymede's flagship product, is a card-based role-playing game (RPG). It fits a unique niche in the broader video game market, Prochazka said, because card mechanics "hadn't really come into the RPG realm." Most popular RPGs are sprawling open-world games like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or CD Projekt Red's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, where the player plays as a single character throughout.
"They're kind of board game-y, but they're also easy," Prochazka said about card-based game mechanics. "They're easy to access and they can have some pretty deep strategy."
And while popular RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher 3 can take hundreds of hours to fully complete, Prochazka said Ganymede "didn't want a game that was endless."
"We didn't want to do something that was going to take a lot of players' time," he added.
Ganymede, which employs 15 people, is aiming to fully release Dark Sky in September. The studio plans to put out a demo of the game during Steam's Deckbuilders Fest from March 25 to April 1, as well, which will showcase some new updates to the game, like its user interface, enemies and cards, per Thompson's March 4 post.
Path to full game release
Getting to March's name change and September's planned release didn't start with a bunch of coding.
Rather, Prochazka said Ganymede started Dark Sky's development process by putting out a survey in 2019, asking RPG players what they wanted in a game. He said that survey garnered over 10,000 responses across social media sites.
Then, Ganymede hosted over 100 hours of Zoom calls with gamers. Those calls included gamers displaying lists of games they want to play, how they browse for new games and how game sales impact their buying decisions.
Ganymede took that information and built three prototypes for three different games, including a survival game, a cooperative game and the earliest version of Dark Sky, then called Xenotheria. The studio found the Dark Sky prototype had the "best chance," Prochazka said.
"I'm a big fan of players know best," Prochazka, a former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer and executive at large video game development companies including Riot Games and Wargaming, said. "I don't know how to explain it more than that. I trust the audience."
Dark Sky has been in development ever since, with a series of iterations over the past few years. The biggest challenge, he said, has been "resource allocation" — deciding what aspect of the game is the most logical to devote time and resources to during the game's development.
One resource that's important for any growing startup is money. Prochazka said Ganymede has raised around $1.4 million to date; some of its investors include the Arrowhead Innovation Fund and the New Mexico Vintage Fund.
Next step in the Dark Sky universe
Another round of fundraising could come soon as Ganymede begins the development of a second game in the Dark Sky universe. Prochazka said the company could start fundraising for that follow-on game in the next 60 days.
The studio plans to go through a similar process as it did with its first Dark Sky game. That includes reaching out to gamers and testing gameplay. Ganymede, he added, has "two strong contenders" currently, but Prochazka didn't offer any definite timeframe on when a second Dark Sky game could be released.
One key component that could boost Ganymede's fundraising efforts is landing a publisher for Dark Sky and its follow-up release.
That publisher is Midwest Games, based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Ganymede formalized its partnership with Midwest in October 2023.
The two companies are similar, Prochazka said.
"We're both startups," he said. "I like that a lot, kind of fighting for our survival and wanting to really do something good in our first-out."
Because Ganymede secured Midwest Games as a publisher, Dark Sky's launch is "sort of guaranteed," Prochazka said. That means the Las Cruces studio will have product revenue to fund its follow-up game, alongside outside investment dollars.
In terms of intellectual property similarities, Prochazka said the Dark Sky universe will feel "a little bit like Guardians of the Galaxy." Both have many alien-like characters with similar senses of humor.
Ganymede plans to announce an official launch date for its first full Dark Sky game sometime after its upcoming demo period. And although the game fills a somewhat unique niche, Prochazka said he isn't too worried about getting people to play it.
"If nothing else, we promise you that we solved problems that are inherent to card battlers. We have a lot of mechanics that solve randomness and that sort of thing," he said. "We think that plus story plus cool characters in an engaging universe — I trust gamers will give it a shot."
