Naming your studio after a cosmic being takes some confidence. In Sanskrit, Akupara means ‘World Turtle’ – the celestial Hindu deity that, according to one Vedic story, holds a group of elephants and the Earth upon its back. This other Akupara, an indie developer-publisher based in California, doesn’t bear quite so much weight on its shoulders. Yet for founder and CEO David Logan there is something of a similarity between the slow and steady movement of the studio and that of its turtle mascot. Its origins, though? Less creation myth than shrewd pivot.
Logan’s first run at helming an indie studio was at the short-lived Night Light Interactive, set up after he’d spent several years working as a freelance producer. Its only release was 2014’s Whispering Willows – a horror-tinged puzzleplatformer that enjoyed a full development team and a largely indifferent publisher. “We felt like we got kind of stiffed,” says Logan, who wasn’t impressed by the publisher’s cookie-cutter marketing campaign and general lack of creativity. “It felt like it was just one of the titles in their slate that they were signing.”
Sales were meagre; critical
