THE STUDIO
Red Essence Games is a small studio creating ambitious, thought provoking games. We create mind-bending, story driven experiences that will keep you asking "what happens next???". With each title we strive to uphold a high artistic standard.
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The Studio began in co-creator Nik Hagialas’ home office in Philadelphia, where he and longtime friend Arman Ayrapetyan started work on their proof-of-concept demo, Mask of Semblance: Curse of The Palati.
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Nik and Arman have since relocated to Houston, Texas, where they are now developing their first full length title, Traveler's Refrain.
MEET THE TEAM
NIK HAGIALAS
Lead Artist / Story
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After diving into Super Mario Bros on the SNES at the age of 3, Nik knew that video games would always be a part of his life, and eventually become his career. This, coupled with Nik's passion for art, music, and storytelling lead him to start a video game studio with longtime friend Arman Ayrapetyan. He loves creating artistic, brain breaking stories revolving around moralistic dilemmas. Nik has been working as a professional concept artist and illustrator for the past decade, and has worked on projects for some notable clients like Disney and Dungeons and Dragons.
MILAN KOVARBASIC
Music / SFX
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Milan is a sound designer from Belgrade, Serbia, and is passionate for making epic music and sound for everything with pretty colors. After 7 years in TV, movie and theater audio production industries, Milan found his way to his real love of multi-discipline sound design for game development. Now, after 5 years in that field, he's still getting kicks for every new game development project.
ALICE THORNBURGH-LIND
UI Designer
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Alice was born in Philadelphia and raised amidst folk music and a lot of trees. Her first love was a hand-me-down copy of Spyro the Dragon. She spent most of her youth doodling through choir practice, and went on to study oil painting, illustration and early music. She has worked for the past 6 years on indie games as an illustrator, animator and concept designer to create richly detailed fantasy worlds.
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ARMAN AYRAPETYAN
Lead Programmer / Game Designer
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An immigrant from Armenia at the age of 2, Arman learned how to read by playing through the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time with his best friend teaching along the way. He grew up playing story based games and enjoys playing action, puzzle, and card games most. He has also built up a strong career portfolio through backend dev work with large clients such as NASA and tinkering with 3D Vis and Augmented Reality in Unity. Arman believes that games need heart and personality, as he frequently calls back to games with fun gameplay and killer soundtracks that forever stay with him.
PALOMA MCCLAIN
Artist
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Paloma is a digital illustrator with a background in design. Video games and art have been a core staple of her life since childhood and she knew she wanted to work on games from a very young age. Today she avidly enjoys traversing the open worlds of fantasy RPGs and helping construct similarly immersive worlds in game development projects. She loves visual storytelling and developing characters and environments in her artwork.
ESSENGER
Voice Actor
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Essenger is a musician, producer, visual artist and content creator based out of Kansas City. He has worked on musical scores and sfx for a number of indie games like Team Kanohi’s “Bionicle: Masks of Power” and Studio Yuraki’s “A Simple Gesture.”