Foramina
Arcfire Games and Monomoon
Foramina is a pen and ink, nightmare adventure video game being produced by Owen Davies (Arcfire Games), Joe Blakeston, Nick Dymond (Monomoon) and Bristol based artist Tom Mead.
Foramina
Made by
Owen Davies
Indie game developer and programmer with an interest in the shared space between games and art.Nick Dymond
Based in Bristol, UK, Nick Dymond (monomoon) has been working with digital audio since he first booted-up a cracked copy of Protracker on his brother’s Amiga 500. He has now been writing music on computers for over 20 years. Taking work experience in recording studios at age fifteen and later studying Creative Music Technology at university, he went on to complete commissions in sound-installation and performance, before being subsumed by the IT industry (gotta pay the bills…). After winding-up as a project manager and game designer in a small studio, Nick quit the relative comfort of an employment contract in 2012 in order to co-found indie studio Force of Habit with Ashley Gwinnell. In January 2016 Nick left Force of Habit to focus on his own creative output, founding monomoon the following month.Tom Mead
Mr Mead is a surreal character designer and fine artist. He works traditionally with pen drawings on paper or wood. Recently he has started drawing and painting large scale and has completed works in Bristol, Brighton, Iceland and Cape town. Mead's inspiration comes from his own intense personal fears and inhibitions, which are represented vicariously through mysterious genderless characters. These stem from his childhood fear of humans dressed as animals, a fear that came from watching the 1976 ballet film 'The Tale of Beatrix potter' as a child. Deciding to embrace his fear rather than run away from it Mead uses this for a basis for his characters and the worlds that they reside in. He is influenced by dark folk tales, the pop surrealist art scene, horror films, and is a huge fan of anything creepy and otherworldly. He has collectors from around the world, has published his first book and has shown his work in galleries both locally and internationally including the RWA and the Last Rites gallery NYC. He lives and works in Bristol where he is constantly hoarding items from around the globe to inspire his work and take it in new and exciting directions....The initial seeds of this project were sown after a chance meeting between Owen and Tom at a Jamaica Street Artists open studio event in 2014. After seeing Tom's artwork, which depicts anthropomorphic creatures in surreal and nightmarish bio-mechanical worlds, Owen and Tom began to think about how they could extend Tom's work by incorporating it into a video game.
Video games are usually design driven, by games designers, who combine game mechanics (rules/actions), narrative and concept art to produce a design brief for digital artists, developers, sound engineers and musicians. However, by placing the artist's work at the centre of the design process, Foramina will explore the potential for artist-driven games development as well as the use of videogames as an artistic medium.
