Dream Harvest

Dream Harvest is a games development studio that makes genre blended games for the core market.

Dream Harvest was founded by Justin French, previously an Audio Engineer who had spent 5 years working in the music industry before making the transition to the AAA and indie games industry. The company was formed in April 2013. 2 months were spent building an experienced team of developers, designers and artists. Our first project, Erosion: The Game That Rocks was a test bed to see how the team would gel. We worked on the project, part time, for 3 months and then put the project on hold as our artist at the time became inundated with freelance work. We brought on a new artist and began work prototyping and designing a game for the band Enter Shikari. The game was a mobile tower defence game that combined traditional tower defence mechanics with MOBA like hero characters (which were the 4 band members). The game was set within festival grounds and had a variety of enemy types that linked in with the lyrics of the band’s music and political ethos and allowed players to build towers that were your traditional festival props such as merch stands, triage tents, the dreaded festival toilets, etc. Players were able to control each of the 4 band members who each had their own sets of abilities and strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, the project was put on hold when Enter Shikari’s management, due to their commitment to their 4th album recording which was due to begin soon, decided that the band’s focus and energy should be within the music only and not within cross media projects, even with protests from the band themselves. We were of course quite disappointed, especially as we had spent almost 6 months in pre-production and were under the assumption that the project would get the go ahead. We hope to return to this project down the line and see if Enter Shikari’s management has warmed up to the idea and potential of cross media projects. We then began work on a cyberpunk stealth / action game named The Tower. We spent 6 months documenting and prototyping ideas before going into production of a demo level. During this time our artist unfortunately had to leave us due to pressure from his full time job at Good Game Studios. We were left without an artist for the second time and with a team in quite a demotivated state due to our streak of bad luck. But through it all the core team stuck together and with our new predicament of not having an artist we decided to conduct an internal game jam where each of the four core team members would work on a prototype for 3 weeks and the game that we, as a team, thought to be most interesting and commercially viable would be turned into a full game. Failure was born. At first as a 2D puzzle strategy game developed in a custom engine where players needed to place and remove cubes on a square grid level to alter the behaviour of Ai controlled units and ultimately kill all the enemy units; and now a full 3D RTS game with a complex layer of player hacking abilities, multiple unit types and buildings and a unique resource management system all centred around the original Ai controlled unit and indirect behavioural interaction concept. Since production began on Failure we have received incredibly positive feedback from people throughout the industry including ex-creative Director at Maxis, Ray Mazza as well as a number of professional Star Craft 2 players. We realised early on that we were onto something special with Failure, an opportunity to bring together the current trends in E-sports gaming along with love of the Cyberpunk themes and RTS and CCG genres all packaged together with a unique singleplayer and multiplayer narrative, combined using a procedural narrative system that takes into account player actions.