Rockhead Studios, a game development company founded in 2010 at PUCRS, will use the funds to create new content and enhance existing games.
The Porto Alegre-based game startup Rockhead Studios has secured a R$1 million investment from Google. According to the company, the funding will be used to develop new games and improve current titles.
The investment was led by the Google Play Indie Games Fund in Latin America, a program that aims to support independent game studios across the region.
Rockhead Studios, part of the Tecnopuc innovation community—the Science and Technology Park of PUCRS—received the investment as part of Google’s initiative to foster Latin American indie studios on its platform.
Rockhead emerged as a startup during the rise of free-to-play mobile games and focused on building the Starlit Adventures brand, with titles released on both mobile and console platforms.
“The investment from Google is being used to produce content ranging from improvements to our existing games to the creation of Starlit Adventures 2, the sequel to the original title, which marks 10 years since the series began,” explains Christian Lykawka, CEO of Rockhead Studios.
According to Lykawka, the company operates with a small core team but collaborates with various professionals across projects.
“We bring together programmers, designers, artists, writers, musicians, voice actors, and more to make our games and animations. Each project calls for a different team composition, and they’re all highly multidisciplinary,” he adds.
Rockhead Studios expands beyond games
The Starlit brand has also grown into comic books and animation. Lykawka recalls that the team developed several games before launching Starlit Adventures in 2015—a game that took two years to produce and became a turning point for the studio. It laid the foundation for a universe and characters that would be featured in later projects.
The studio’s most recent release is Starlit Kart Racing.
Rockhead was founded at the end of 2010 and soon joined Raiar, the former startup incubator of Tecnopuc. This is the second game company founded by Lykawka.
“The first was Southlogic Studios, in 1996, incubated at CEI/UFRGS. It was later acquired by Ubisoft in 2009,” he recalls. Ubisoft also became part of the Tecnopuc community in a partnership that led to Brazil’s first postgraduate program in digital games—where Lykawka taught for many years.