Folkvang Studios (Also known as Chaos Rift Entertainment) is an Indie Maker and Publisher of PC and console video games. We’re a small company with a grand vision!

About (Let’s get Raw and Personal)

Ok So I’m skipping all that “PR stuff” and going straight telling the story how and why. I like to keep it real and hate that impersonal corporate talk. 

Folkvang Studios is one person, me. I do it all. Crappy web design, programming, marketing, *art* and building the games. I make games that I love to play. I hope you also enjoy playing my games. I do games I love playing because they’re familiar to me. Even after 2,139 hours playtesting (my current Steam stat) “Animal Friends Adventure” I can still be motivated to keep on going. I chose the game making path to expand my programming knowledge and build my skills. I love programming AI and building games gives my AI a world to live in. 

I started into Game making shortly after my dfaughter was born. I discovered BuildBox. It’s some drag and drop game maker that had a few templates. So I signed up for a year subscription and made a Flappy Bird Clone named “Rocket Shark”. I don’t believe in straight copy, there’s no benefits. So my “Value add” was multiple themed levels that were also procedurally generated. Each level had it’s own look and musical score. Honestly it was a pretty cool little game project that took about 6 months. 

After BuildBox I discovered an amazing educational site Udemy. I signed up for a Unity 3D course and Unreal engine. Both by the same awesome teachers. I just clicked with Unity and it’s community support at the time was superior than Unreal. I I made a few never published clones. Color Switch, a match-3 and a few other games.

ADHD Sidebar. I do plan a switch to Unreal engine once I make back my investment in Unity via their Asset store. Yep, even with two games published on major consoles I am still not “Even Steven” with Unity. My community building skills fell behind as I was focused on making Animal Friends Adventure the best I possibly could. 

“The Incredible Adventure of Super Panda” was my first major game project. All the art, icons, everything was run by my 2 year old daughter for approval. My focus on this game was the AI. I focused intent on making it “living”. Granted it was a very simple AI, the inhabitants were aware of their surroundings. Unless told, they’d avoid cliffs and overhangs. Even then, they’d only jump a certain distance down. I did this all in C# with lots of research into raycasting and collision detection. I added in some really interesting traps that required skillful jumping. The “in game store” was more of a way to practice UI and features. 

Animal Friends Adventure was my next project that is finally at “completion”. This was a major undertaking. It was my first 3D game project. I ported Super Panda’s AI and converted it to 3D. This was actually fun for weird people like me. Boss fights are my weakness. So I put emphasis on them during this current update. Bosses will melee or throw things depending on your distance from them. They move better and are just more enjoyable and challenging. Audio was also greatly updated. But that’s for another page. 

Back in 2019 I cashed out my 401k and took a voluntary layoff from my corporate job. After taxes and all the government penalties for wanting to work for myself, I had enough money to last a year. I managed to get Animal Friends Adventure 90% done and took my current Job in October of 2019. I started 2020 with -$473 in my bank and finally submit the initial version of Animal Friends Adventure to publish. 

ADHD Sidebar: I’d love to add character customization and clothing choices to the characters. I can’t afford an artist for that yet. But it is a “would love to add” feature. 

My son loves tractors and Farm Simulator 2019. I wrote this elsewhere. But I find it a cute weird behavior. He starts a new game, pulls a a loan and goes to the store to buy a pickup truck. He then drives around hitting street signs to knock them over and collect in the truck. He’s 4. My daughter is 7 now and loves building the farm and creating areas for the various animals to live. Why tell this? Well it is cute. It’s also the inspiration for my next series of games I am starting to work on. More information once I have a working prototype. The gritty series Immortal Realm and Steam City Chaos will have to wait. Unless I miraculously find $millions to fund these two projects. 

A Little (More) About Me.

I’m a gamer at heart. I grew up with the Atari 64 and Nintendo. I grew up with Mario and similar games. I’d take my Nintendo on family vacations. My first PC games were on the Tandy computer. Space Quest and King’s Quest adventure series. I was once asked what I wanted to be and I’d say “Game programmer for Sierra”. They even had an office near me in Boston, but I never could get hired, even as a tester. Which is weird. So I said F it and made my own game company. I feel as if I wasted too much of my life playing other people’s games. 

As my ADHD grows worse, it becomes harder to focus and stay entertained with singular activities. I just enjoy too many wildly different things. 

Craig Giannelli, Founder and CEO

I was at a wedding, this is the only time you’ll see me dressed this way.

Current activities are:  

  • Onewheeling on my OneWheel XR. I even bought Bonk Blocks from Electric Stoke to practice skills to prevent life ending scenarios. 
  • Self improvement and education. Like today I woke up, went to Udemy and did a few courses on Unity related to my upcoming game series. Then I realized I really needed to fix these websites and finally make a store page. So here I am. 
  • AI and machine learning. I wrote a Python Tensorflow app to stylize images. I want to make a self driving RC car just for the heck of it. 
  • Udemy courses. I have literally signed up for over 300 Udemy courses. From Python to 100 different Unity courses. 
  • Photoshopping weird things. So far I just randomly put a raptor into my pictures. 
  • Rollerblading. Love it. Great cardio. 
  • I bought a KingSong s20 EUC. Waiting for it to ship. This might replace the OneWheel, not really. My plan was as a commuter vehicle since my Soul draining Corporate job is forcing us back to the office. 
  • Making and editing videos. I started out on YouTube years ago. I’ve made over 500 videos. But I lack time to really make it shine. I have so much awesome content I can put out if I just had time to sit and focus. 
  • I tutor UNCC students in Java programming, Data Science and Computer Science. The current professor is one step away from “just learn it yourself”. He just doles out grades as students struggle with the material. 
  • I do Mountain Biking too. Though, to be honest, I don’t like the cycling community. 
  • I dislike the current state of big tech censorship, so I established a Social media site “This Club”. I haven’t really worked on the page much because time constraints. People deserve the right to self expression and do not need to be protected from themselves. If there are private groups, pages and ability to block content and people, there’s zero need for a company to do that. The Exception is terrorism and illegal activities. Ok, keeping minors safe from sexual predators too. My own kids inspired me to make kids games, so I have a moral obligation to protect children, not just my own.

Things I try to avoid:

  • Politics. It’s just toxic and divisive. It’s a huge consumer of time and mental capacity. Politics gets you nowhere fast. I don’t believe companies should express political opinion, it limits customer base. 
  • Using Crises and “special interest months” to Self promote. It’s foolish. The only reason I even briefly mentioned the Ukraine crises is because I have so many friends from Ukraine. Some live there, most live in the city I live in. My wife is Ukrainian. So it is one thing I just cannot avoid. Sorry :( 
  • Toxic, demotivational people. Human nature in general defaults to pulling people down. I’d have done significantly better in my early life if I just ignored people’s opinions. In 5th grade I was amazing at gymnastics. Then some kids made stupid comments and I stopped. I was great at math until people teased that. So just be your own person and don’t worry what other people think. 
  • Taking things personally and getting offended. My sister occasionally trolls my LinkedIn. I broke the script and just kept busting back jokes instead of letting it go down the bad path. Seriously, if someone criticizes you, own it, make a joke and move on. 

Peace

Yeah this got too long and personal. But I’m not a “company”. Just a person like you trying to make my way in the Universe. 

Invest in Folkvang!

Buy my games and share the story! Seriously that is the best way to help. I’d love to do more cool sh*t and make cool stuff for people. If I can reach an initial goal of $5 million I can at least start. At the very least I can quit the day job and free up 60 hours a week to work on cool stuff.  This goes towards marketing (extremely expensive) and hiring people to start growing the company and making bigger, better games. Why invest? Because we’re building something good. Something for the future. We are putting the soul back into gaming.

Share, like and Subscribe to our Social media. The links are all at the very top of the website and viewable on every page. It’s super easy and doesn’t require much of your own time. It’s FREE to do too! This is an amazing way to help Folkvang Studios and really be part of something.