ORKEN: Creating a Transmedia Universe as an Indie Studio

Introduction

While the name SIXMOREVODKA had already been my nickname and email handle since around 2004, the studio itself was officially founded in 2010. At the time, I had already been working as an exclusive cover artist for Marvel Comics for about four years, supporting both their publishing and licensing efforts, and quietly contributing concept work behind the scenes to several Marvel-related videogame projects in development.

Work kept coming in at a steady pace. I initially dragged my wife into helping me manage things, but it quickly became obvious that this wasn't sustainable. We had to expand, hire artists, and professionalize the whole operation. None of this was planned. I never set out to own a studio. It grew around me organically, like barnacles on a whale carcass.

Each completed job led to more demand through word of mouth, and before long, we were fielding offers from studios like Warner Bros. and Sony, alongside an increasing number of game developers looking for visual development support. The real turning point came in 2013, when Riot Games signed us as their exclusive outsourcing partner.

We contributed to the modernization of League of Legends and led the entire production pipeline for Legends of Runeterra, from concept design and worldbuilding all the way to final card art and marketing illustrations. That partnership fundamentally reshaped the studio and set the foundation for everything that followed.

Despite that success, I've always had a soft spot for creator-owned IP. Growing up, my biggest art hero was Todd McFarlane, not just for his work at Marvel, but for the moment he walked away at the peak of his career to create Spawn. That act of independence didn't just shake up comics; it changed the action-figure market and proved that creators could build something massive on their own terms.

Artists like Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Ashley Wood (Popbot) reinforced that idea for me. Every time I saw a creator successfully take that leap, I felt a sting in my side, wondering why I wasn't brave enough to do the same. In 2014, I finally tried. We released Degenesis, our first creator-owned project, a transhumanist, post-apocalyptic tabletop RPG with an absurdly high production value on the art side.

It became a cult hit among hardcore fans but never broke into the mainstream. It was too dense, too niche, and ultimately too demanding as an entry point. After eight years of publishing, we laid it to rest in 2021. It wasn't a failure, but it was a hard lesson. Which brings us to ORKEN. Ironically, this is the oldest idea of all.

The core outline dates back to 2001, when I was a 22-year-old graphic designer riding the Berlin subway to work. When I dug up those notes, I kept the core intact and began polishing everything around it. It took me nearly 25 years to feel mature and experienced enough to tackle this story properly, but if an idea survives that long and still feels right, there's probably something worth chasing. This one does.

ORKEN

This is probably just my OCD on full display. I hate creative team changes on IPs I care about. I hate writers switching mid-season. I hate canon being discarded because nobody bothered to keep track of it. And I especially hate visual facelifts nobody asked for. I've always gravitated toward worlds that stay internally consistent, narratively and visually, across all formats.

There's little that kills my interest faster than seeing something I love translated from one medium to another and coming out the other side feeling completely unfamiliar. Whether it's books turned into films, games adapted from comics, or the reverse, that disconnect breaks immersion for me. Once that's gone, I'm usually out.

With ORKEN, I deliberately searched for a visual language that could retain its impact across media, something that would work as a book illustration, as sequential art, as animation, and inside a 3D engine without losing its identity. The goal was a cohesive signature: recognizable, flexible, and strong enough to grow familiar over time.

Sure, I could have focused on just one format, say, perfecting the books, and left everything else for later. But this is where my producer brain kicks in. If I can think holistically from the start, I can avoid much bigger problems down the line. I like having a mental roadmap of the obstacles ahead, so I understand the scope of what I'm committing to.

Is it daunting? Absolutely. And yes, I tend to bite off more than I can chew. But I've learned that growth usually comes from raising the stakes. Or, as the saying goes: if you're meant to hang, you're not going to drown.

During the very first week of negotiations, Nikola "Stepko" Stepković, Demagog Studio's Technical Art Director, visited our office. He stood in front of a wall covered in ORKEN concept art for hours, mumbling to himself:

"Everything looks the same. In the last couple of years, 3D production has been streamlined so much, and there is so much visually similar content that I can't tell one from the other anymore. Everyone's chasing hyper-realism, and that alone accounts for most of the production cost. If I can capture your linework in a shader, we'll save ourselves a trillion headaches, and it'll stand out instantly against all that grey noise and sludge."

Then we tried to actually build it, and everything went to hell. The goal was never to create a one-to-one replica of the illustration style, that's impossible anyway, but to capture its mood. We started with environments, aiming for something believable yet abstract. That meant loose, deliberately unrefined textures. I wouldn't call it painterly so much as reductive and impressionistic, large shapes first, surface detail second.

Characters were a completely different nightmare. Most real-time rendering pipelines rely heavily on lighting tricks to achieve fidelity. We had to consciously abandon many of those tools and work with silhouettes, flat cells, and minimal shading. You could make a character look great in a controlled setup, but once the player took control, everything started falling apart. Standard pipeline conventions simply didn’t apply.

At some point, we embraced the reduction instead of fighting it. Stylized lighting and post-processing outlines became lifesavers, and the realization hit us hard: Mood over detail = Holy Grail. This was all happening at a pre-alpha stage, and somehow we weathered the storm. There's still plenty of room for improvement, but we now have something far more important: a proof of concept. We know it's possible. And now the real question is how far we can push it within the frame we've set for ourselves.

Book Publishing

What other options do you really have when you decide to go fully independent? Sure, we could set up a Patreon and hope for the goodwill of a few, but hope is neither a strategy nor a proactive way of making a game. On the other end of the spectrum, the most common refrain we heard during months of pitching was: "Your IP has so much potential, now prove there's demand."

I'm not a fortune teller. I can't prove jackshit in advance. The audience decides, and the audience is king. So instead of pretending otherwise, we leaned into the only honest exchange we could offer: tangible work. A line of products is already in development. Serialized fiction that introduces the world. Books and art are produced with the same care and production value we bring to everything else.

The proposition is simple: buy something that exists today, get immediate value for your support, and help us stay independent while we build something bigger. In practice, this creates an ecosystem where each part supports the others. The books and art fund continued development. Kickstarter gives those publications visibility. The game, in turn, expands the audience for the world as a whole.

None of it relies on promises alone. Everything rests on work already done, or well underway. There's something deeply honest about this approach. We're not overpromising. We're not asking people to bankroll a vision that's still miles away from standing on its own. Instead, we're offering finished, premium products up front, while using that support to offset the much higher risk and cost of game development.

The rest, we're willing to shoulder ourselves, because we believe in what's at the end of that road. Will it work? Who knows. All you can do is try, adapt, and stay true to your own conscience without bending yourself into something unrecognizable just to please everyone. Is ORKEN for everyone? Absolutely not, and it was never meant to be. The goal isn't mass appeal at any cost.

The goal is to make something that genuinely excites us. If we do that right, chances are it will resonate with others along the way. Appealing deeply to some has always felt more honest and more interesting than trying to appease everyone and ending up larping a version of ourselves we don't recognize.

Challenges

Everything we can't afford because of budget constraints eventually lands on my desk, and I just have to figure it out. Whether that's pitching, producing, unblocking people, or being the secretary who makes sure everyone knows where the latest files live. There's no way to run something like this unless you're willing to work brutal hours and wear an unreasonable number of hats at the same time.

And when you hit a wall, because you inevitably will, you reach for the phone. You lean on your network, call in favors, and hope someone answers. Thankfully, my network is wide, and my list of unpaid favors is long, so more often than not, the right person shows up just in time to keep the ship from crashing into the rocks.

I'm also painfully aware that none of this would be possible without support at home. My wife and son cheer from the back row, even for the tiniest wins, and without that grounding force, I'd probably have to start questioning my own sanity. This kind of work is a grinding, mind-numbing marathon. It requires constant QA from everyone involved, because all parts are interlocking: story, art, worldbuilding, game design, and one small mistake can trigger a chain reaction somewhere else entirely.

That's why rigid production plans don't really work for us. Nobody can plan for the unpredictable. Anything set in stone becomes obsolete the moment reality kicks the door in. You have to stay dynamic and malleable, even though every fiber of your being craves stability and routine. I've lost count of how many times something blew up in my face over the past 15 months because I underestimated the challenge, or trusted a single interpretation of information without verifying it twice.

When it comes to worldbuilding and IP development itself, though, I follow a very simple rule: never lose sight of the core conflict. That's the backbone of everything. It's what you return to when problems feel unsolvable. If you identify that conflict early and commit to it, you solve a surprising number of storytelling problems years in advance.

ORKEN's core conflict hasn't changed in 25 years, and it's still the reason everyone on the team cares about this world. Once that shred of identity is locked in, everything else becomes a technical problem, not a wrestling match with your soul. And technical problems, while exhausting, are at least solvable.

Control of the Final Products

My team trusts my gut. They know I have the ending written, and they know I'm not improvising our way into a fog bank. There's a clear destination, and a plan to get there. A lot of the internal trust we've built comes from that certainty, this is a complete story, not a loose collection of ideas hoping to turn into something later.

There's a larger arc that spans all of ORKEN's development across media, and the team has seen it, questioned it, and ultimately signed off on it. That shared understanding is what keeps everything else aligned. There's nothing more motivating than knowing you're all pulling in the same direction, toward the same outcome, instead of interpreting a vague brief through five different lenses.

I honestly wish this kind of authorship happened more often across media. I would love to see great authors directly shape their own film adaptations, or continue the narrative of their books through games themselves, rather than watching an IP get passed from hand to hand.

Too often, licensed adaptations are handled by well-meaning but detached producers who recycle familiar elements to extract nostalgia and revenue, instead of expanding the world with the same intent and emotional weight that made it matter in the first place. Nobody cares more about a story than the person who created it.

That doesn't automatically make the result perfect, but it does make it honest. Yes, that level of hands-on control comes with enormous pressure, and it forces you to learn a lot of things the hard way. But I'll take that any day over watching a world get sliced into pieces and auctioned off to the highest bidder, each one drifting further away from its core identity.

The Novel Format

Maybe not all great IP originates in novel form, that would be hyperbole. But I'd argue that the majority of enduring IP does. Reading is the most intimate form of consumption we have. It demands effort, time, and imagination, and that investment creates a much deeper bond between the reader and the world they're entering. For most people, finishing a book from first page to last is an achievement in itself, and that journey forges a strong connection to characters, settings, and ideas.

That's also why so many adaptations are met with the familiar refrain of "the book was better": nothing can ever fully live up to the version a reader builds in their own head. Another important aspect is serialization. A film or a big AAA game is often a singular event, spectacular, but fleeting. A novel, especially serialized fiction, becomes part of a reader's routine. It can be picked up in passing, returned to, and lived with.

Over time, readers grow alongside the world. Batman isn't iconic because of the costume alone. He's iconic because comic books have been showing up monthly for decades, creating familiarity through repetition and presence. Marvel still maintains its comic output not because it's the most lucrative format, but because it continuously feeds and anchors the larger universe that later explodes into films and games.

That thinking directly informs how we're building ORKEN. The novels allow us to establish depth: culture, history, internal conflict, and emotional context. They let us sit with characters in ways games often can't afford to, simply because games are built around action and agency. A novel can spend pages inside someone's head. A game has to externalize that through systems, mechanics, and choice.

What's been especially exciting is that this hasn't been a one-way process. Because we're developing multiple formats in parallel, ideas have flowed back and forth. There have been moments where a mechanical solution in the game sparked new lore in the novels, or where a narrative detail written for the books informed how a system should behave in play. I love that kind of cross-pollination, it makes the world feel alive and collectively authored, rather than locked to a single discipline.

In that sense, novels aren't just the starting point for ORKEN. They're the backbone that everything else grows around, while the games become a way to inhabit the world that prose first invites you to imagine.

What is ORKEN?

Both the free demo on Steam and the Kickstarter campaign are slated for February 26. We deliberately timed them to launch on the same day so people completely unfamiliar with ORKEN can get their first taste of the world through play. The demo introduces the game's systems, but more importantly, it sets the stage for the larger narrative universe. If players connect with what they experience, the Kickstarter gives them a way to step deeper into the fiction and support the continuation of the project as a whole.

So, what is ORKEN? Once there were Neanderthals, and we probably outcompeted them. Humans are an invasive species. In order to progress, we must expand, and we'll stop at nothing to do so. This is a story as old as time. This is human nature. What's always puzzled me is how rarely this idea is confronted directly in fantasy.

Instead, responsibility is usually outsourced to some conveniently monstrous race. Orcs reduced to mindless murderhobos, stripped of agency, forever manipulated by vague forces of evil to do the conquering and pillaging on our behalf. ORKEN asks a very simple question: What if Orcs were just another part of our evolutionary story? Would they go the way of the Neanderthal, or fight tooth and claw for their right to live?

Telling that kind of story requires mature perspectives. Reality is rarely binary, and complex moral questions can't be resolved by presenting a single, sanitized point of view. ORKEN is built around two opposing perspectives, each with its own depth, contradictions, and internal logic. Two empires at their peak encounter one another for the first time, driven not by pure malice, but by fear, fear of ruin, fear of humiliation, fear of the unknown.

That friction is the core of the entire universe. ORKEN revolves around this axis: opponents meeting from radically different cultural contexts, stripped of any shared language or understanding. Where speech fails, weapons talk. Whether that cycle can ever be broken, or whether Edom's soil will be stained red by it, is the question at the heart of the story.

This is not a one-dimensional "evil oppressor versus virtuous oppressed" narrative. Sometimes it's not about who drew first blood, but about who keeps drawing. That's the narrative side of ORKEN. Visually, the world is shaped by a collision of influences I grew up with and ones that stayed with me later in life.

There's the stupendous clarity and emotional directness of ThunderCats, The Last Unicorn, Princess Mononoke, and Watership Down, blended with the grit, patina, and grounded realism of films like Apocalypto, There Will Be Blood, Flags of Our Fathers, and Letters from Iwo Jima. We deliberately mix raw, unapologetic storytelling with restrained, reduced, and stylized imagery, letting suggestion do the heavy lifting, so the themes have room to resonate and linger rather than being drowned in surface detail.

Building IP

Working 16-hour days hasn't exactly done wonders for my social life, it's dried it up almost completely. I'm fairly disconnected from what the wider industry is doing right now, so I honestly can't say whether more creators are moving toward similar models. From where I'm standing, this approach isn't healthy, and it's definitely not sustainable long-term. But I do see it as a trial by fire.

If we can push through this initial phase, where everything is fragile, underfunded, and interconnected, the worst of it is behind us. After that, you can start thinking in terms of longevity instead of survival. Right now, this is about getting over the first ridge.

A lot of that workload comes down to one core principle: we refuse to sell anything that isn't finished yet. We could have launched our campaign a year and a half ago, when everything sat at maybe 10% completion across the board. But that would have meant selling clouds and promises instead of tangible work. I'm deeply uncomfortable asking for trust without showing proof.

So if someone asks me whether they should follow a similar path, my advice is simple but not comforting: know exactly what you're getting into. Make sure you already have real work done, finished, printed, or locked for dissemination, with a clear revenue path, even if it's small at first. Momentum matters, but credibility matters more. Just as important is how you treat your audience. Activate them early.

Respect the people who stick around long-term. Let them see the project evolve in real time. Be transparent, ask concrete questions, and give them meaningful agency. Not vague stuff like, "What would you like us to do next?" but real trade-offs: "We're considering adding X, but it will delay release by three months. Is that worth it to you?" That kind of honesty builds trust. And when you're attempting something this demanding, trust is the only real currency you have.

Conclusion

2025 has already been the hardest year I've experienced in this industry, and I honestly don't know how to read 2026 yet. Investment is at an all-time low, risk tolerance has evaporated, and almost everyone I speak to is either downsizing, struggling, or doing whatever they can to keep the lights on. It's not a thriving environment by any stretch.

If I'm being optimistic, and maybe I am, I think we'll see a soft rebound over the next six to eight months. Watch me eat my words 6 months from now. What we're doing with ORKEN isn't rocket science. It's one creative vision applied consistently across a series of products, supported by a proactive team willing to do the unglamorous work early.

Any publisher or studio with significantly more resources than we could replicate this model and probably have a much smoother ride. In the end, it doesn't come down to secret knowledge or genius. It comes down to commitment, patience, and a willingness to endure the inevitable birthing pains.

For SIXMOREVODKA, the direction is simple: fewer service projects, more ownership, and more time spent building things that actually belong to us. Success for ORKEN isn't about hitting some abstract metric or becoming the next breakout phenomenon. It's about establishing a sustainable universe, one that can grow over time, across media, without losing its identity or burning everyone involved to the ground.

And on a more personal level? I hope the future includes fewer meetings where people ask me about KPIs. I genuinely don't care. I care about making work I can stand behind, building something that lasts, and, ideally, finding a bit more time for my family along the way. If ORKEN can give us that balance, then it's already a success.

Sixmorevodka

Interview conducted by 80 Level