STATEFALL

Inspiration

STATEFALL started with a real place.

We captured part of Moossee, a lake near Bern, Switzerland, using drone photography and reconstructed it as a playable Gaussian-splat environment. The result felt surprisingly real - not just visually, but emotionally. The paths, shoreline, trees, rushes, weather, and distances already felt like somewhere you could explore.

That environment ended up shaping the game. Rather than inventing a fantasy world and building systems into it, we started asking what kind of game belonged here. The answer became a game about leaving safety behind, venturing outward, and returning home with something valuable.

The project draws inspiration from survival games, resource-management games, and ARPGs, but the goal was never to copy any one genre. We were interested in the tension of risk, the satisfaction of finding useful loot, and the feeling of gradually building something that lasts.

That real location eventually became Moss Island: the player's home, refuge, and starting point for every expedition.

What it is

STATEFALL is a survival and resource-management game for mobile - a Survival Expedition ARPG set across a shifting archipelago.

Players begin on Moss Island, a safe home settlement built around a radio tower, a fisherman, and a growing network of upgrades and services. From there, they venture outward in search of resources, equipment, technology, and opportunity before returning home to invest what they've found.

At the heart of the game is a simple tension: the more you carry, the more valuable your expedition becomes - but every item adds weight, slows movement, and increases risk. Every trip asks the same question: do you keep pushing, or do you head home while you're still ahead?

Failure costs the loot you were carrying, but never your long-term progress. Moss Island continues to grow through upgrades, discoveries, and new opportunities, ensuring that every expedition contributes to a larger journey.

Key systems include:

The Greed Loop — every item adds weight; more weight means more risk, slower movement, and harder decisions.
The Unlucky State — accumulated risk from time, weight, noise, and overextension eventually causes the world to turn against you. It is earned, visible, and avoidable rather than random.
A Shifting World — resources migrate, weather changes conditions, and new opportunities appear through events and radio broadcasts.
Settlement Progression — the Fisherman's turquoise campervan workshop and the island's radio tower expand as new technology and resources are brought home.
A Large Item Ecosystem — camping gear, fishing equipment, hunting supplies, medicine, tools, technology, and expedition equipment form the backbone of progression.

How We Built It

The most distinctive part of STATEFALL is the world itself.

Instead of modelling an environment from scratch, we captured a real location with drone photography and reconstructed it using Gaussian splatting, rendered through a custom Metal-based engine. The result is a photoreal environment that preserves much of the atmosphere and character of the original place.

The main player character was created from a real-world scan using the same pipeline. Additional elements including the Fisherman, campervan, radio tower, equipment, and gameplay objects were then designed to sit naturally within the environment.

On top of that foundation we developed the gameplay systems, inventory, progression, UI, and the full pre-production package: Game Design Document, Player Journey Map, Visual Concept Package, and Production Plan.

Built with: drone photogrammetry, Gaussian splatting, a custom Metal renderer, 3D asset creation, custom UI systems, inventory design, and environment design grounded in real geography.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was discovering what the game actually wanted to be.

Early on, STATEFALL could have become a traditional survival game, a crafting game, or an extraction game. As the design evolved, we realised the strongest part wasn't the extraction itself - it was the feeling of returning home.

That insight changed almost everything. The settlement became more important. The radio tower gained a purpose. The Fisherman became part of progression. Exploration became less about survival for its own sake and more about chasing opportunity.

The technical challenges were equally significant. Running large-scale Gaussian-splat environments on mobile hardware required careful consideration of performance, streaming, and level-of-detail systems. We also had to solve the problem of integrating characters, gameplay objects, and interactive systems into a world built from real-world captures.

Throughout development we kept the scope focused: one home island, one expedition destination, and a single-player-first experience designed to validate the core loop.

What We Learned

The biggest lesson was that a game's identity comes from its emotional goal, not its mechanics.

Once we framed STATEFALL as a game about leaving home, exploring, pushing your luck, and returning changed, the rest of the design started to align. The inventory system, weather, settlement progression, radio tower, and Unlucky State all began supporting the same journey.

We also learned that reducing punishment doesn't reduce tension. In many ways it sharpens it. The question stops being "Will I lose everything?" and becomes "How much more am I willing to risk before I head home?"

Finally, working from a real place taught us how much atmosphere comes from geography itself. Distance, exposure, weather, visibility, and scale all emerge naturally when the world begins somewhere real.

What's Next for STATEFALL

The next step is expanding beyond Moss Island.

We want the archipelago to open up into harsher and more distant destinations, with new opportunities, rarer resources, and more reasons to leave home. Longer term, the design is intended to support a shared multiplayer world where the survivors you encounter are real players and settlements continue to evolve whether their owners are online or not.