Your future in game design starts here

“It was frightening because I was going out on the biggest limb of my life, creating a business, managing a team and showing ATTACHED to the public for the very first time while also working full-time. But it has also been equally as exciting.

“AVCON in July 2025 was our first ever event and it was wildly successful with so many stopping to play our first (very janky) playable build, running out of all our stickers and making many new friends and connections with fellow developers, streamers and gamers alike. Since then, we have attended a few other events which were also very successful in our primary goal of just getting ATTACHED out there and seeing what works and what doesn’t.” 

ATTACHED is a 2.5D platform-adventure game about navigating grief, love and the power of memories. Traversing through a world overrun with manifestations of his grief, you play as an old man – the Husband. Helping to protect his memories and retrieving those that are lost to strengthen him, he navigates his world to lay his late wife to rest.

“Initially in 2024, ATTACHED started as a university assignment from a game jam exercise. We had 4 categories of single-word descriptors with numbers assigned to them. The goal was to roll some dice to randomly pick those words to make a game from (in this case, a vertical slice). Those words were “primitive, love, joining and loss”. 

“At the time, there were only 3 of us and we made a basic playable art demo as our assignment, with games like “Limbo” and “Gris” being our biggest influences to start. Afterwards, only I was left to continue as the other two wanted to focus on their studies and amazing projects.”

ATTACHED had a brief hiatus until Gian brought it to her last topic of study in 2025 where it was picked back up and a small team was formed – now known as her company Free Spirit Games. 

“For the major theme of the game, it was decided from the very beginning that it would be around mental health, specifically the journey of grief. Initially it was based on the Kubler-Ross model – known as the 5 stages of grief, with the levels each pertaining to a stage. 

“But once ATTACHED was picked back up in 2025, we expanded the initial concept to dive deeper than the five stages of grief. We want to show that the journey isn’t linear and is influenced by a multitude of other factors, making everyone’s journey unique. 

“We are currently in the works with a mental health organisation to help better depict grief, dementia and therapeutic practices through our gameplay and narrative. We have also changed the scope of the game to become much larger and more metroidvania-like, with games like “Limbo”, “Celeste”, “Hollow knight” and “Gris” being our main influences.” 

Free Spirit Games is in the early development stage. All visuals are hand-drawn, music originally composed, sounds effects and more made by a small team. 

“It will be a few years until full release is on the cards for ATTACHED so we have quite a few milestones to hit yet! In the meantime, we plan to continue chipping away, learning, tabling at as many events as we can, applying for funding all that fun stuff and more! We absolutely want to get community involvement on ATTACHED in the near future so keep an eye out for that!

“On the personal side of things, my plan is to keep learning. Learning how to be a better leader for my team, a better artist, absolutely learn more about game development as a whole – everything I can get my hands on! 

“The beauty of this industry is that you never stop learning even when you are qualified. There is not only always something entirely new that you could learn given the many mediums and tools of art out there, but you can always improve. You can learn new techniques, become faster, more accurate and it isn’t always linear. You may have rough patches but as long as you keep going, you will get better, and your work will reflect that growth.”