STRIX GAME STUDIO

Everend The Owl Exploration Game

Explore a vast underground world, find your way home.

Learn More

Hey! Listen! Our game is now released! Go to our Itch.io page here to download and donate, or visit our download page here !
Explore a vast, ancient cave and overcome its many obstacles as Kaia, an adolescent owl.

With a sudden volcanic eruption shattering your world, you were torn away from both family and home by fire, singeing your wings and casting you down from the rest of your flock. You wake up alone, washed deep down into what appears to be a gigantic cave. You have not yet learned to fly, and must traverse through complex caves using what few items you could find. Many obstacles stand in your way, but with a little cleverness, and a lot of bravery you can live your own legend, and perhaps rediscover some forgotten ones as well.

Explore

Immerse yourself in the environments and creatures of a unique subterranean world, rich with detail and character.

Solve

Enjoy engaging environmental puzzles, and piece together the story of the ancient ruins through riddles and cave paintings.

Connect

Connect with a loveable character as she makes her way back home, and uncover the dark backstory of her own ancestors's journeys.

Platform

Everend is playable on both Mac OSX and Windows operating systems, proudly built using the Unity Game Engine #madewithunity

Releasing Today!

Our game will be released at midnight, as a proof of concept for a further developed game. Follow us on our social media for more information!

General Info

Everend is a single-player, exploration driven, 3D puzzle platformer.

Gameplay and Trailer Videos

Are you more of a 'believe it when you see it' sort of person? Well then, see our story and gameplay for yourself below! Enjoy!

If light is in your heart, your will find your way home.

Rumi

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

Francis Bacon

Our Featured Concept Work

Our team is lucky to have some very talented concept artists, whose work has helped to bring our visions of Everend to life. We have some concepts of Kaia, the caves, and other game features below for you to enjoy. We hope you find them as beautiful as we did!

See more at our concept art pinterest page!

Our Team; The Good Folk of Strix Game Studio

As we all know, birds of a feather, flock together. This team consists of 12 senior Game Design students from the University of Wisconsin Stout, with an even split between 3D artists and programmers. There may be other people contributing to other aspects of Everend, such as sound/music, but they will be credited and mentioned as they appear. So without further ado, here are the members of Strix Game Studio.

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William Brereton

Programming Lead

We give him the list of what needs to be done, he supplies the sass and sarcasm all on his own.

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Emily Dillhunt

Art Lead

This game is her brainchild, and she has developed an addiction to drawing adorable owls as a result. Not a bad addiction if you ask me.

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Mitch Clayton

Design Lead

"The team wizard", lives in unity. Likes destiny and metroid more than any mere mortal probably should.

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Daniel Craig

Programmer

"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"-Daniel working on our game lighting at some point, probably.

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Megan Daniels

Artist, PR Princess

Captain of the Badass Coat Committee, and the voice currently in your head.

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Gabe Deyo

Programmer

This poor man will likely hate cameras by the time he's through with this, play this game for his sake!

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Phoenix Hendricks

Programmer

Specializes in music, level design, and having a cooler name than literally everyone else.

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Alex Knutson

Artist

Our sole animator/rigger, to which we are eternally indebted.

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Logan Larson

Programmer

Our resident voice of reason on the level design team. Master of the quiet authoritative voice.

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Zach Pasterski

Artist

Every time zach draws level map things, an angel gets its wings. LOTS of angels have wings thanks to that fact.

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Hue Vang

Artist

Our token grad student, lives, breathes, and probably sleeps making awesome concept art. Just kidding, he doesn't sleep.

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Tyler Walvort

Programmer

If you need to move a boulder or make a lovely scenic waterfall, he's your guy.

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Dave Beck

Executive Producer, Professor, Benevolent Overlord

The one and only! Coincidentally, also 'the one and only' to keep our team's goals... and budgets... firmly grounded in reality.

From The Blog

Check out our wordpress, thatowldevblog.com, to read posts about our development process, get to know our team a bit better, and keep in the loop about our progress in making Everend.

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The Importance of Sound Design

on 4 Dec, 2015 Posted By Phoenix Hendricks

Sound in games tends to be a part of game design most people don't consider as it's something we don't usually actively notice it while playing a game. This is because sound is a very subtle way of breathing life into the game, usually in tandem with action. It's also a way of giving character to a game and to...

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Environments

on 1 Dec, 2015 Posted By Zack

Hello everyone, just here today to talk a bit about the environments in Everend and show a bit of our inspiration for our levels and how we’re going about making them. So for the environments within the game we broke up each of the levels to encapsulate an area of the cave. In order we are intending to have a water area, forest area, darkness area, fire/lava area, and a temple area...

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Crystal Cave

on 19 Nov, 2015 Posted By Mitch

As you have seen with some of our art from previous blog posts, our game takes place in an elaborate cave system. One of the most important parts of building an environment is having good references. Luckily for us there is a wonderful cave close by. In order to get the best and most realistic depiction of what a cave may look like we went and visited Crystal Cave in Spring Valley, WI...

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Meet and Greet: Kaia the Owl

on 4 Nov, 2015 Posted By Emily

Our lovely concept artist Hue gave you a bit of a taste of what’s to come for Everend in his last blog post, and Logan told you about all of the awesome things you can do and how you can explore our game–but an important question remains: who are you? As I’m sure you’ve come to gather from our URL, the title of this blog post, and concept art to date, the main protagonist of our game...

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The Gameplay

on 28 Oct, 2015 Posted By Logan

We are attempting to blend a 2D and 3D experience with Everend. What I mean by this is the game looks like a 2D side scroller and for the most part plays like one; however, the character has full 3D motion in the world. The game starts with the player lost deep in a cave. They will travel through several levels solving puzzles and avoiding obstacles on their journey to the surface...

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The Art of Everend

on 22 Oct, 2015 Posted By Hue

In Everend, there are two major characters that drive the experience of the game: the lost owl and the cave in which said owl must escape from. These two opposing forces are then glued together by the secondary characters such as the cave dwellers, the cave artifacts and its somber history. There’s a lot of moving parts that demand good art, but most importantly consistent art...

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Status Update #1: Making Progress

on 14 Oct, 2015 Posted By Tyler

The whole team is hard at work on Everend as we enter into our fourth week of development. Coming out of the first sprint, which ended earlier this week, we have made a lot of progress on Everend as a whole. We created a prototype showcasing some of the mechanics that we have already implemented into the game, including character movement, water physics, lighting, sound, simple AI...

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Meet the Team

on 7 Oct, 2015 Posted By Will

Now that you know a bit about what Everend is, it’s time you meet the people of Strix Game Studios. This team consists of 12 senior Game Design students from the University of Wisconsin Stout, with an even split between 3D artists and programmers. There may be other people contributing to other aspects of Everend, such as sound/music, but they will be credited and mentioned as they appear...

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What is Everend?

on 30 Sept, 2015 Posted By Megan

Hello, and welcome to Everend’s spiffy new game development blog! Our team will update the blog with at least one new post by Wednesday each week, so check back often to see if there is anything new to check out. I look forward to keeping you in the loop with everything we are up to, whether it is gameplay, characters, art development, music, I hope we can share with you...

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Kaia's Spelunking Gear

If you are an owl needing to explore a cave, you will require some specialized equipment. Between the various cave denizens, ancient puzzles, and the treacherous cave environment, our hero needs to keep on her toes and use whatever she can to help her along. Luckily Kaia has it all figured out:

Read more about Kaia and how she was designed in our Meet Kaia blog post!

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