Edmonton-based indie game studio latest to take blockbuster-making skills and get 'pretty risky'

A new independent video game studio is the latest team to draw on previous experience in some of the world's leading game companies to chart new courses in an increasingly fraught industry.

Studio Reset, based in Edmonton, is a three-person team whose members worked together at several places, including Bioware — makers of the popular Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.

Creative director Kaelin Lavallee left Bioware in 2015, working with a handful of other game companies before co-founding Studio Reset with Kris Schoneberg and Francis Lacuna earlier this year.

"It was just [about] exploring the creative and production side of game development for me," Lavallee said.

Studio Reset fits a theme among its fellow creators of other recently announced or released independent Canadian games: they all have extensive experience working for larger studios.

There's this summer's Ambrosia Sky , whose Toronto-based Soft Rains studio includes veterans from Ubisoft and Bethesda. And there's the upcoming "emails as turn-based combat" game Reply All , made by Toronto-based Peculiar Path whose founders have worked on series like Assassin's Creed and Red Dead Redemption .

Small teams striking out on their own is never without risks in creative industries — particularly in video games, where they must compete against thousands of new releases every year. But as AAA-level studios become more risk averse chasing the next big hit, it could be the best way for developers to flex their creative muscles.

Studio Reset's first game, The Eventide , will be a supernatural mystery game set in a "neon-noir" Canadian setting, according to a news release. It pays homage to classic TV series The X-Files as well as narrative-based puzzle games like Case of the Golden Idol .

Players will choose a pair of investigators from a pool of possible characters to examine a series of unsolved cases. Much like Mulder and Scully's contrasting viewpoints in The X-Files , each investigator will have alternate interpretations of the cases, leaving the player to piece together the truth of the matter.

"Everybody sees the world differently. So having a cast of characters that each sees a mystery in a different light, and seeing their different perspectives and how they interpret clues and evidence — that was a really exciting opportunity for us to kind of explore that space," Lavallee said.

Paul Fogolin, president of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, which represents the video games industry in this country, says their most recent report from last year documented that out of the 821 games studios in Canada, 729 of them had 50 or fewer employees.

He said AAA and indie studios have a "symbiotic" relationship that together make for "a deeper and more resilient industry."

"Large studios provide talent, investment, mentorship and a critical mass of expertise, while independent studios bring entrepreneurship, experimentation and new ideas to the ecosystem."

For Philippe Morin, who co-founded Montreal-based Red Barrels in 2011 after over a decade at Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, going indie was about getting hands-on with the game-making process again.