User:Tgoodfellow/We Were Here (game)

We Were Here is a free indie co-op puzzle solving video game available on Steam, produced by Total Mayhem Games. The game was created by a multidisciplinary team of 15 students from the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Story
Two characters, one an "adventurer" and the other a "librarian", are separated and lost in a castle in the midst of a frozen wilderness. Communicating by walkie talkie, the librarian, who has access to information, tries to help the adventurer solve puzzles and escape from the castle.

Awards
The game won the Indigo award for best game of the year in 2017, and was nominated for the Gamekings Award for 2017 and the Independent Games Festival Best Student Game award for 2018.

History of Total Mayhem Games and We Were Here
Total Mayhem Games was formed during a College Minor Game Design & Development located in the Netherlands at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The teams could be formed by the students themselves, which lead to the formation of a multidisciplinary team of 15 students. Originally the team called themselves Total Mayham Games, where the 'e' in Mayhem was replaced by 'a' to make a silly wordplay, but this was later changed during the formation of the company Total Mayhem Games.

The students only had 14 weeks to create a game. It could be any game they wanted to make. The teachers advised against any games containing zombies and open world mechanics. This advice was due to the short time the students had to make a game. While in concept phase, the team was inspired by games such as Myst, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and real-life escape rooms. This eventually led to the concept of We Were Here.

We Were Here first appeared on Steam Greenlight, following a green light by the community and steam in just one week. It also had an open alpha test on gamejolt.

On the 2nd of February 2017, Total Mayham Games launched We Were Here for free on steam. The game quickly became popular and was picked up by famous youtubers like ZerkaaPlays and MM7Games.

After a successful launch, the team wanted to continue making games. Not all of the students of the team wanted to stay, usually due to their finishing their education. Eventually, only the core developers of We Were Here (Victor van den Beld, Benjamin van Hemert, Lucia de Visser, Thomas van Opstal, Sam Meyer and Christian de Kool) remained and formed the company Total Mayhem Games. While forming, the investor Art Zuyderwijk invested in Total Mayhem Games. The original music artist of We Were Here, Leon van der Stel also stayed in partnership with Total Mayhem Games.

The team then started working on the next installment in the We Were Here franchise, We Were Here Too

Sequel
A sequel, We Were Here Too, was released on 2 February 2018, exactly one year later from the release of the first game.