Studio Reset, a new Canadian indie studio, has been founded by veteran developers from BioWare, Inflexion Games, and Timbre Games.
Creative director and producer Kaelin Lavallée, design director Kris Schoneberg, and art director Francis Lacuna have extensive AAA studio experience that has guided Studio Reset to focus on sustainability, original IP, and staged funding.
Studio Reset secured early investment from the Canada Media Fund (CMF) for its debut project and was one of 31 studios chosen for the CMF’s Interactive Digital Media Prototyping program.
Studio Reset received CAN$250,000 to develop a prototype, supporting efforts to attract further investment and apply for more CMF production funding. The grant also enabled collaboration with other Canadian companies and creatives through paid contracts.
“The application process itself was a huge amount of work, but it forced us to think seriously about scope, roadmaps, budgets, market research, and revenue modelling,” Studio Reset’s founders tell GamesIndustry.biz.
Studio Reset is committed to a “smaller, more intentional” model to ensure sustainability, guided by the principle: “Don’t build a studio that requires a massive hit to survive.”
“We’re taking the discipline and craft we developed at BioWare – where having a vision and actually executing on it were treated as equally important – and pointing them at something smaller and stranger.”
“Small teams move faster, communicate better, and stay creatively aligned in ways that are much harder to maintain at scale. We aren’t trying to grow into something bigger, we’re just trying to maintain our focus and build with intent.”
The founders continue: “It also means being honest about the scope of our games. We’re making something that fits who we are as a studio right now, both in terms of size and ambition. We don’t believe scale is the only measure of success.”
Studio Reset’s debut title is a neon-noir supernatural mystery that uses “Parallax Deduction” – a term for its “perspective-led approach in gameplay design.”
The game avoids illogical puzzles, ensuring solutions are based on clear in-game clues.
“Fundamentally, it’s about perspective,” the team notes. “Two people can look at the exact same object or event and come away with completely different conclusions.
“In the context of a mystery game, that becomes really powerful. We’re less interested in presenting a single objective interpretation of events and more interested in how players construct meaning from incomplete information.”
