Flavourworks hires new MD following £3m investment round

Flavourworks has announced it has hired Harry Holmwood as its managing director following a successful investment round that secured $3.8m (£2.9m) from Hiro Capital and Sky Ventures.

The Erica-developer reports Holmwood has previously worked to take game companies to IPO as well as heading Japanese publisher Marvelous’ expansion into Europe. He also launched Stardew Valley on mobile with mobile studio, The Secret Police.

“As a huge fan of narrative games since I first got hooked on text adventures in the early 80s, I was blown away when I played Erica,” Holmwood said by way of a press statement. “The combination of Flavourworks’ Touch Video technology with compelling narrative and live performance gives us a glimpse of how this genre will evolve. As soon as I saw the company’s plans for the future, I knew I had to get involved.”

It has also hired Joe Cunningham from the National Film and Television school.

The company has also indicated it’s still hiring for other new positions too, including programmers, designers, writers, and artists “for current and future projects”. For more, head to www.flavourworks.co.

At Develop:Brighton earlier this year Flavourworks’ creative director and co-founder Jack Attridge gave a fascinating talk entitled Designing for Interactive Narrative and Live Action based on his experience working on live-action FMV title Erica, which can be played with a smartphone or a DualShock 4 controller.

“Films have a very specific kind of structure and conventions and it’s something that everyone is ingrained to understand,” he said at the time. “Then it’s all about emotional drive not skill: get players on board through characters and the story.” 

Having established solutions to the typical misconceptions about games, Attridge addressed FMV’s own challenges that Flavourworks wanted to champion: controls are limited to buttons on top of a flat video, no interaction with the world itself, long period of passivity, limited player impact on story, player/character dissonance. “This can lead to both a compromised film and a compromised game, and you end up not serving any audience,” he added.