'So we had to sit down again and look at it all from scratch, go backward.' We were doing it on our own money and we were already a year in, and we didn't have anything substantial to show for it. We were about a year into the project and we were having a crisis. 'It was only after a while that we started to realise that it wasn't working. 'So we were like 'let's make a ninja game, that will be cool.' 'Maybe it was because Jennifer had made action games before'. 'I don't even know why we did that now,' says Tossell. 'This initial concept for the game was a fast-paced platformer with a very acrobatic ninja, and you would create pop-up platforms for the character to progress,' says Schneidereit. While Tengami is a deliberately slow, almost meditative adventure game experience, the original concept was entirely different. With the concept in place, along with the knowledge gained from Duncan Birmingham, Nyamyam's attentions turned to gameplay, something that introduced a whole new set of challenges. 'Some of them were really old and that was fascinating for us, seeing all the different ways you could use pop-ups to make interactive experiences.' We spent the whole day there just looking through his library. He's got the most amazing collection of pop-up books. 'We contacted Duncan because we were so thankful, and he invited us to his house. For me as a programmer, it gave me a basis to build the tools and work out the mathematics that allowed us to construct pop-ups in the game. 'Duncan wrote a book that very systematically breaks down the rules of fold types and how you actually construct pop-ups. 'But we were lucky enough find a book by a guy called Duncan Birmingham. 'When we were initially researching it, it was a struggle to find anything that explained very clearly how you actually made pop-ups,' explains Tossell. If the digital pop-ups were going to work, they had to be constructed in a way that would work with paper.

The result of these experiments was a pop-up book concept - the idea that Nyamyam could make a game built around transforming environments. And just experiment with a bunch of things.' 'We really wanted to take this newfound freedom to just go a bit wild with it and be bolder with design decisions.

Games that nobody else has made before, that are at the edge of what the 'core' game audience is expecting. 'So let's use this smallness and agility to try and see what different kinds of games we can make. 'We were like - okay so we're just three people now,' says Schneidereit. 'It was pretty much - what are we gonna do and what is the company gonna stand for? And what kind of games are we going to make?'īetween them, they laid out a plan. Just sitting in the Nyamyam office on that first day was very liberating, but incredibly scary. 'Leaving all that behind was a real shock for me. 'Rare was basically my life for 14 years,' he says. Tossell had been at Rare for most of his working life, starting out on Diddy Kong Racing for Nintendo 64 in 1996. The trio had discussed setting up their own studio for some time, but jumping ship in late 2010 brought with it mixed feelings, especially for Tossell. Schneidereit, Tossell and Agarie met while working for Rare on the Xbox 360 title, Kinect Sports. In our latest making of, Schneidereit and Tossell describe their struggle to fulfil that vision and bring Tengami to life. The first fruit from this mission is Nyamyam's debut title Tengami - an inventive adventure game played out in a gorgeous, Japanese pop-up book world. In 2010, alongside Phil Tossell and Ryo Agarie, Schneidereit set out to confound the expectations of 'core' gamers and bring fresh ideas to the industry. These are the words of Jennifer Schneidereit, co-founder of British studio Nyamyam. So it's no wonder that people are kind of trained: this is a video game, this is how you work out whether it's a good video game. 'It's not the audience's fault, developers have set these expectations over the past 30 to 40 years. 'The game industry teaches you what a game should be, because mainstream experiences are extremely similar.

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