Meet the faces behind A Far Away Realm
At Lava Labs, we‘ve made some incredible progress over the past months. Now that things are coming together — as our team is expanding, our game is taking shape and our community growing — we’d Iike to take this opportunity to share who‘s behind Lava Labs and what we‘re all about. In this blog post, our founder and CEO Kaya will share how it all started, some of the faces currently working hard on our game AFAR and what you can expect from us in the near future.
Hi there!
In 2019, after graduating from Stanford Business School, I founded Lava to experiment with what I believed was the imminent intersection of movies, games and technology.
I was lucky enough to get my friend Trip Hawkins (EA co-founder) and the Makers Fund on my side at an early stage. Today, almost three years later, our team operating across the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, consists of some of the most talented minds the games industry has to offer — at Lava, we draw on years of combined experience at leading companies like Riot, EA, Dice and more.
The project we‘re working on, A Far Away Realm, is by far my most exciting project to date. I get to combine my love for games with my fascination for the crypto space and blockchain technology.
If this is your first time hearing about our game: AFAR is an arcade third-person hero-based platform shooter for PC/browser. Players compete against one another in 4-minute battles of 4 rounds, each consisting of a mix of obstacle courses and shooting elements, in their race to the finish line: the next spaceship leaving the planet. Find out more about our debut title, the AFAR universe, or the characters and their backstories over at www.playafar.com or stay up to date with latest announcements via twitter @playafar.
So far, our work on the title has been immensely rewarding. Seeing our diverse community on Discord grow over the years and shaping the game with the help of feedback from many AFAR enthusiasts across the globe has been incredibly productive — a level of support that we could have never dreamed of and that‘s allowing us to progress rapidly.
We‘ve made substantial progress on a map-design level over the past couple of weeks by playing around with different configurations in a modular test map that we have developed. This map allows us to quickly test and iterate gameplay elements and mechanics in different in-game environments. Based on these insights, we can then generate more natural maps to be featured in the game on release.
Beyond AFAR, as game developers, our vision is to create a WEB 3.0 platform that multiple future games can utilize. Working together with our talented community, and embracing the fundamentals of player ownership, we collectively create parts of A Far Away Realm by sharing our internal tools and resources during different stages of development cycles. In short: we wouldn‘t be here without your support — thank you!
Everyone at Lava Labs is working incredibly hard to make our first title as great as it can possibly be, and there are many more exciting updates we can‘t wait to finally share with you. Make sure to follow our social channels for regular announcements and regularly check this blog where we will be sharing more detailed updates on AFAR very soon!
Yours,
Kaya
This sounds exciting to you and you could imagine becoming part of our journey? As it happens, we‘re still looking for motivated people to join our team. Don‘t hesitate to reach out to jobs@lavalabs.gg to find out about our current job openings.
