Twin Earth

About

About

Twin Earth is a Swiss game studio with a focus on gameplay innovation. We believe that gaming is the ideal medium and that it's potential has not yet been fully uncovered. Our goal is to explore what is possible within gaming and push the boundaries with every one of our titles.

Our team has its roots in the Half Life modding community, where we have invented the Zombie coop genre with BrainBread, a multiplayer coop survival zombie shooter, and pushed character customization in the sci-fi team shooter Public-Enemy. Our team consists of industry veterans, who have worked on titles such as Ryse, The Climb, and Morphies Law and have shipped titles on all major platforms.

We currently explore new themes with the game Elementary Trolleyology, a mobile & PC game about you, a toxic workplace, and morality. We also work on a unique combination of voxel sandbox and tower defense with Castle Craft, a third-person game where you build unique castles and defend them against hordes of enemies in siege battles of epic proportions.

Team

Jonathan Erhardt
Jonathan Erhardt
Founder and Game Designer

Jonathan splits his time between game design, programming, legal, and operations.

With his Frankensteinian background in law (PhD from Bern), philosophy (BPhil from Oxford), teaching (Master in education from Bern), and game development (previously working on Morphies Law, Brainbread, Public Enemy and for Windward Mark Interactive), he feels like he somehow beat the cosmic odds, and found a place where he can apply all of it.

Finn Meinert Matthiesen
Finn Meinert Matthiesen
Art Direction & Lead 3D Artist

After receiving his diploma in communications design in 2009, Finn directly started to work in games and eventually became Principal 3D Environment Artist at the German AAA studio Crytek. During his career, he worked on various AAA game titles, like the Crysis franchise, Ryse - Son of Rome, Warface, Homefront 2, The Climb, and Robinson - The Journey.

Afterwards, he continued to work on upcoming AAA titles at the Berlin based design studio KARAKTER Design. KARAKTER Design won several Emmy Awards for their art direction on the Game of Thrones TV series and was responsible for the art direction and design on AAA games like Horizon - Zero Dawn, the Killzone franchise or the Call of Duty series.

Joseph Lin Chu
Joseph Lin Chu
Senior Programmer

In a past life, he went through grad school and worked as a machine learning scientist on some pretty cool things involving natural language processing and computer vision, but eventually found himself feeling personally unfulfilled.  

After some time in the metaphorical wilderness, he joined Twin Earth to pursue a mission he thinks is more closely aligned with his values and philosophy, as well as one that allows him the freedom to satisfy the creative passions that he’d thought he’d had to leave behind. He hopes to be able to contribute to creating some truly profound game experiences that will make an impact on the culture of our societies and potentially spread worthwhile ideas that will help create a better world, as well as create happiness in those who play them.

Marco Santini
Marco Santini
Senior Programmer

Marco originally transitioned from audio engineering and mixing into programming, where he has clearly found a new home.

He is a UE4 generalist and works on everything, from giving character abilities to building amazing castle architecture from simple blocks.

Alessandro Chiri
Alessandro Chiri
Trainee 3D Artist

Alessandro started his journey at SAE Institute Zurich in 2018 and completed his education as a Game Artist & Animator in 2020. Ever since, he started focusing on character art and enjoys the process of creating "living" creatures in 3D.

Daniel Hofer Photo
Daniel Hofer
Infrastructure and Backend

Daniel Hofer supports Twin Earth by taking care of the Twin Earth infrastructure and making sure the servers are running. 

He started his career in game development working on Public-Enemy and BrainBread and has since launched the Minecraft server hosting solution Multicraft. He was also the lead programmer on Morphies Law. 

Philipp Kuhn
Philipp Kuhn
Senior Programmer

After studying to become a software engineer and subsequently working for a couple of years in C++ and C# environments, Philipp decided to follow his passion and transition to game development. When his studies to become a game designer were completed, he worked on various projects in both Unreal Engine and Unity before joining Twin Earth.

Philipps passions in programming games are the creation of flexible and interconnected game systems, enabling swift and intuitive user interactions through smart UI systems, and the effortless creation of almost infinite game content through procedural generation.

Games

Castle Craft is a game where players can build huge castles in a dynamic voxel world and must defend them against hordes of enemies in epic Tolkienesque siege battles.

Castle Craft consists of two stages. In the first stage, the game combines survival and building aspects, giving you complete freedom to organize your defense. You can either focus on building fortifications, recruit a large army, or improve your character to become more powerful.

When the enemy army is approaching the second stage begins. It is now up to you to defend your king against hordes of enemies in an epic siege battle. This is where your efforts in the first stage will be put to the test: Alongside your defending army you will have to defend your castle and protect the king against the incoming enemies. Whether you succeed depends both on your preparations in the first stage and your skill in battle.

Castle Craft is a unique and novel blend of base building, strategy, and epic third-person siege battles - all in a fully dynamic voxel world.  

Previous Projects

Our last game Morphies Law is a robot morphology driven 3D shooter with a simple basic law: each weapon hit transfers mass from the victim’s damaged limb (making it shrink) to the corresponding limb of the attacker (making it grow). An immediate consequence of mass-stealing is that skilled players become big and easy to hit, whereas beginners shrink until they become difficult targets. Highly skilled players may therefore play with casual players in the same match and both can enjoy the game. Fairness ensues.

Although Morphies Law was created under a different company (Cosmoscope), it was mostly the same team behind it. Before Morphies Law we developed the well received Half Life modifications Braindbread and Public-Enemy under the name IronOak.