Te Reo meets Robots in new Kiwi game

1 minute read

For immediate release

GRABITY, a prize-winning game where robots test out the latest gravity-gun technology, will be released May 31st on Steam. Grabity is being brought to life by two Kiwi game developers. Steve Salmond, the programmer, is a University of Auckland Computer Science graduate who studied Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon in the US, while Moritz Schlitter is the 2D/3D artist, animator and level designer.

Keen to see the game translated into Māori, the team got in touch with Jack Potaka, a student in Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, who is working with Te Whainoa Te Wiata to capture the essence of the game’s language in Te Reo.

Grabity won the 2016 Kiwi Game Starter competition, was selected for the 2017 PAX Aus Indie Showcase, and was a finalist in the 2017 Chromacon Art Awards and the 2017 Play by Play Awards. The game has already been translated into five other languages – French, German, Portuguese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Steve and Moritz are incredibly grateful for the support they’ve received from the Kiwi gamedev community. “It’s taken us a year of intensive self-funded work to get Grabity ready for market, and we wouldn’t have made it without them,” says Steve. “Unlike film and the other creative arts, there’s little public funding available to get a game off the ground, and its tough.”

“This is a clean-green industry, and a huge opportunity for New Zealand. Last year the video game industry made more than $100 billion world-wide – more than music and film combined.”

Website: https://www.grabitygame.com/

Assets: trailer, screenshots and art can be downloaded from https://www.grabitygame.com/press/, or catch the trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb_uMp38ebA.

For further information or interviews, media should contact Team Ninja Thumbs via [email protected].

Please contact [email protected] directly with review code requests.

Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/652810/Grabity/

Content creators can request Steam codes via Keymailer, https://www.keymailer.co/g/games/50728. Creating a Keymailer account is free.

Trailer

About Team Ninja Thumbs

Ninja Thumbs is a small independent game studio based in Auckland, New Zealand. We started off doing game jams, but soon realized that we wanted to take on a bigger project together. Grabity is a side project that quickly grew into a serious undertaking when we realized we had a really fun prototype on our hands!