The Vision

We are a group of experienced game developers asking for your help to make a unique and visually stunning graphical adventure. We will be using a combination of inspiring 3D and beautifully crafted 2D artwork to set a new artistic benchmark for the point and click genre, not just on PC and Mac, but on tablet devices too. We call our style ‘Western Art, Eastern Heart’.

We’re re-imagining the point and click adventure, bringing it up to date so that it can be played just as easily on touch screen devices as with a mouse. We've taken out complicated inventory screens and obscure puzzles and replaced them with the streamlined interactivity and intuitive design now expected of modern games.

So What Is 'The Realm'?

The Realm is set in a far distant future where the world has been reclaimed by nature. Our once proud cities now lie abandoned - overgrown with strange plants and twisted vines. The locations in The Realm reflect the real-life landscapes and architecture of the North East of England.

Some humans remain, but they are now leading a more simple life based around small rural communities entirely divorced from modern technology and science. The age of magic and mysticism has returned and there are rumours of stirrings in the forests.

The Realm follows the story of Sarina, a headstrong young girl who leaves the safety of her village to embark on a desperate quest to discover a cure for her sick mother. On her journey she befriends a legendary giant stone golem named Toru, a gentle but powerful creature, and the unlikely couple begin a treacherous adventure together.

Sarina and Toru travel across the wild and beautiful land to a forgotten city, where legend speaks of a flower growing with amazing healing properties. Their presence in the city awakens a long forgotten shadowy force that controls the Lampheads - mysterious plant-like creatures with a powerful and deadly gaze.

How Do I Play The Realm?

In The Realm, the player controls both our heroes - Sarina and Toru. To complete the adventure, the player must learn to utilize the unique abilities of both characters to solve the many puzzles and to overcome the many threats that dwell in The Realm.

Sarina is adventurous, feisty and smart. However, she is vulnerable to the many natural hazards and creatures found in the world. She is fast and nimble, but her size means that she is unable to perform many of the tasks required to progress. Luckily, Toru is able to lend his power in assistance.

Toru is a giant stone golem who has been dormant in the forest for a long time. He’s naive, pure and he can't remember his past. He fascinated and easily distracted by the wonders around him.

Slow moving but powerful, he is impervious to many hazards, and throughout the game he learns new skills and abilities from Sarina.

Only by leading Sarina and Toru through a number of beautiful but dangerous locations and solving a series of environment-based puzzles, will you be able to help our heroes fulfil Sarina's quest and help Toru discover his purpose.

Sarina and Toru can be moved around each location and interact with objects found within. When interacting with an object, each character is presented with a unique set of available actions, specific to the given context. There are characters that help, and others that hinder, and there are deadly traps and evil lurking in the shadows. You must use all your cunning to survive!

Making great games is a costly business - we know all too well as we've been making them for many years. We've already invested a significant amount of time and money into this project, but we still need your help to fund the development of the game. Of course from our total of £195K, we still need to pay Kickstarter, payment fees and then we need to make and post your wonderful rewards out of that too.

We estimate that it will take eight months to build the game and there’s lots of work to do in that time: designing puzzles, drawing the environments, the creatures, the objects, all the different animations, dressing the scenes, recording the music and sound effects, coding the game, and testing it.

We believe in this game, and we’re doing as much as we can with our own money and time, but there are no shortcuts to producing the beautiful game we want to create.

Stretch Goals

If we manage to exceed our target then any further funding will go straight into making the game even more fabulous.

We will spend every available penny on cramming as much beauty and enjoyment into the game as possible, but there are also some specific goals we’d like to achieve as well:

====> 250K - MORE CONTENT - We will extend the game experience by adding in more locations, characters and puzzles giving you a more engrossing in-depth adventure.

====> 300K - MORE PLATFORMS - It has always been our dream to see this game on tablet, and we have kept that in mind right from the beginning with a touch-screen friendly design. This level of investment will enable us to create an iPad and Android version too.

====> 350K - MORE MUSIC - We know Richard Jacques will do an amazing soundtrack for us, after all he’s won more awards than he can fit on his mantelpiece. If we raise this amount of money, we can afford to hire a real orchestra and bring his score to life!

Anything over that and we’ll invest in extra content such as new levels, more cut-scene footage, making the game longer and more in-depth. There is so much we’d like to do! We'll work with our supporters to finalise what we spend the extra budget on.

We showed the game to the usual publishers and, even though they all loved the concept, they weren't able to provide funding for this type of game.

It just doesn't tick the convenient boxes, or incorporate the latest buzzwords - it’s not freemium, it’s not social, and it’s not a cheap mobile puzzle game or a multi-million pound first person shooter. The Realm is a good old fashioned adventure game, made with love and care by dedicated artists and creators.

We sincerely believe that you will want to play this type of game too - something unique, innovative and engrossing. With your support we can prove that there is a market for this and bring this exciting project to life!

Our Story

Atomhawk Design has been making fantastic art for top developers and publishers of AAA games for some years. The Realm started as an internal art project created in the team’s own time, born out of their insatiable passion for creating cool stuff.

Around a year ago, Ron Ashtiani (Atomhawk’s Creative Director) reconnected with Tom Szirtes, an old colleague, at the Game Developers Conference.

Ron and Tom had worked together many years ago on The Thing - the best selling, survival-horror game - and had remained good friends. Ron shared the illustrations that Atomhawk had been working on, and Tom was immediately enchanted by the magical world the team had created. Tom suggested making the concept into an adventure game.

Ron and Tom then recruited another member of the old Thing team, Andrew Curtis, to work on a game design. Inspired by the potential of the project, Tom quit his day-job making mobile games for a telecoms company to concentrate on The Realm.

Last November they travelled to Games Connection in Paris to test our game concept out on the industry. It was picked by the advisory group for the prestigious "Selected Projects" event and seen by many publishers and investors. Everyone loved the concept, they all wanted to play it, but weren't willing to invest in an adventure game that didn't have a hook to continually extract money from you, the player.

We have the talent and the experience to make this an amazing game - we just need to find people who can share in our vision. That's why we are here on Kickstarter - we need to your support to make this game. Please prove us right!

The Team

We have a fantastic, highly experienced team with a strong relationship and shared vision:

Ron Ashtiani founded Atomhawk Design in 2009 with a team of highly talented artists from Midway Games. Over the last four years his creative guidance and determination has helped drive the company to become one of the world's leading art and design studios. Prior to Atomhawk, Cumron worked for a number of high profile game development companies. During the last 16 years he has focused on artistic/creative direction and played a key role in the running of several studios and in the development of 20 shipped game titles as well as numerous films and applications.

Tom Szirtes started programming at the age of 10 and was developing professionally before leaving school. His first ‘proper’ job was at Sega working on Dreamcast and on many hit games including Sonic. Tom has 17 years experience in development on a number of AAA game projects. More recently he has been managing development at Orange’s R&D centre where he’s been responsible for overseeing a number of successful and award winning innovative mobile apps and games.

Richard Jacques is a multi award-winning and BAFTA / Ivor Novello nominated composer for video games, film and television. He has worked on many blockbuster games including: Mass Effect, James Bond 007: Bloodstone, Little Big Planet 2 and Starship Troopers. The man’s a legend.

Andrew Curtis has over 15 years of games industry experience, having shipped multiple titles (including Killzone 2&3, as well as Start the party; Save the World) on a wide variety of platforms including PC, Handheld and Consoles as well as motion gaming and emerging technologies. Andrew specializes in creative direction, design process and new IP generation built on a wealth of practical experience at studios including: Creative Assembly, Computer Artworks, Electronic Arts, Guerrilla Games, Supermassive Games and Softkinetic Studios.

Projects that the Team have worked on



Hopefully we've got some rewards that you're really going to like, but if you have some more ideas please don't hesitate to get in touch. Obviously we'd love for you to pre-order a copy of the game. If you can't afford that then any pledge is really appreciated. If you think there is something missing then please get in touch and let us know.

If you are outside the UK we still really appreciate your support - we've included dollar and euro amounts on our Rewards list as a guide but these conversion rates may of course fluctuate.

We've tried to make the rewards tiers as simple as possible but due to limited editions there are some complications. See our rewards matrix below.

We will endeavour to release rewards as soon as they become available but there may be cases where it makes sense to bundle items together for postage reasons.

Here are some of the highlights of our pledge rewards:

We hope that after reading this you’ll want to help bring The Realm to life and come along with us on this amazing journey. Every little helps so please tell your friends about the project, and together we can make this game a reality!

You can follow our progress on our website and keep in touch with us on Facebook and Twitter where we’d love to hear from you too.

Of course we’ll continuously update this page until The Realm is finished and released and we will keep listening to your view and comments so that we can refine our proposal accordingly.

Risks and Challenges

Building a game is always difficult there is so many things that have to come together to make it great - art, design, technology and audio. Luckily we have a fantastic team with a proven track record making great games for some of the most successful companies in the business.

Still we are trying to do some things in this game that haven't been tried before in the same way. So we've got more work to do to prove these game mechanics add up to a meaningful experience. We will manage this risk by building the game using agile development techniques - constantly testing it and playing it to make sure its fun and engaging. And then of course we have you, and we really want you to be part of this process. We'll be sharing our progress with you and asking for your feedback so we know we'll building a game you're going to want to play.