Today we’d like to introduce you to Luke Sapir.
Hi Luke, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I got my start in game design back in high school. I have always been enamored with games of all kinds, most of all video games ever since I was a young child, and alongside with music, video games have been my greatest passion. I started to seriously work towards game development when I was in high school, where I experimented with Dungeons and Dragons to develop my storytelling and design skills, and it wasn’t until the middle of high school where I first learned to code using a small text adventure in Java during a summer program at CalTech. Once I learned the whole development process of even a small game, I knew immediately that building games was a true passion of mine. I spent my first 2 years of college double majoring in Piano Performance and Emergent Digital Practices (a major that was relatively new at the time), and then I decided to transfer from University of Denver to a film school in LA, named New York Film Academy, where from 2019 to 2022 I studied Game Design as my full major. After having completed my major with several student projects under my belt, I took on the rather ambitious task to build an entire Unity game from scratch at home, based on a concept that I had during my studies. The title of the game is Reverie, and along with a team of other artist contributors who more recently hopped on, such as Jacob Malek (narrative and enemy design), Andrew McIver (music) and Justin Yeo( Sound design) have been working on this game for the past 2 years and plan to develop it into a full-fledge game from our indie studio here in South Pasadena — Studio Bergamasque. Right now, we plan to upscale the project’s team size with more programmers, 3D animators, and 3D modelers for level design, and we’re currently building the funds through kickstarter, patreon, and personal funds to get the project moving off the ground. However, at the moment most if not all of the game is built from scratch and royalty free assets, which creates a sort of “Homemade” vibe to the game at the moment, one that I don’t plan to get rid of as we make the game bigger and more polished!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a pretty rocky road to get this game project underway primarily due to my own mental health struggles, as just this year I lost my biological father, and a couple years back I went through a really difficult break up that made it hard for me to manage my own living arrangements. These struggles, plus the always-an-issue topic of funding, has made it tough for the game to take off quite as fast is it possibly could, but I have a lot of hope for the game as I am coming up with some funds through my work and life insurance from my father that could help invest into the game, and I believe that as the game shows more and more potential, with more people hopping on to work on it because they love the idea, we’ll get more backing and more funding for those “indie experts” hiding in schools and on the web to come out and hop onto the idea. My overall business strategy is like that of folk music–music by the people for the people. In this case, Reverie will gaming by gamers, for gamers. And so I believe the right people will come out, the message just needs to be loud and clear enough for it to reach them.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m a video game designer who specializes in directing every element of the game’s production, and at this point in time I am an expert in using Unity to build games. I’m most proud of my current project, Reverie. I believe what sets me apart from others is my ability to consider the points of views of other people very seriously, and evaluate for myself what that could mean for me if I were to apply the logic of others to a particular problem I may face. I’m always happy to be in an environment that focuses on inspiration–pure inspiration–and those “aha!” moments are what I live for, and honestly what gamers who play our games live for too.
What were you like growing up?
I was pretty chill growing up…I played a lot of video games and played a lot of piano, so I guess you could say I was a giant nerd. Played Halo behind my mom’s back, played nintendo games of every variety, almost every blizzard title, all the sid meier games, and was and still is a huge fighting game nerd. Pretty much every major franchise of game has influenced me in every way (most of all, dark souls), and I just can’t stop thinking/talking about them! I would say in general I’ve always been a nerd and a geek, but also I tend to ask people questions about their views on life and art. I don’t enjoy small talk all too much, and I always try to make the conversation interesting for the other person in some way or form.
Pricing:
- Reverie is free to download, but we accept any price as donations for development.
- The full release is going to be $25 USD
- Our minimum donation price is $1.99 USD, if you’d like to pay for the game.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.studiobergamasque.com/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuEBnzDJeuI&ab_channel=JustinYeo (this is our trailer)
- Other: https://studiobergamasque.itch.io/reverie
Image Credits
Taken by Luke Y. Sapir
