Mateusz Skutnik

Mateusz Skutnik
Name	Mateusz Józef Skutnik
Date of birth	July 26th, 1976 (age 47)
Lives in	Gdańsk, Poland
Profession	Writer of graphic novels, graphic designer, game developer
Notable works	Rewolucje (graphic novel), Kinematograph (a film adaptation of one of his graphic novels), the Submachine series, the Covert Front series, the Daymare Town series
Logo

“no comment.”
— Mateusz Skutnik

Mateusz Skutnik (aliases "Murtaugh" and "Mask") is the author of the Submachine series, as well as many other notable series of games, including "Covert Front," "Daymare Town," the "10 Gnomes" games series, and the "Squirrel Family" games.

A Polish newspaper, with an article regarding Mateusz Skutnik's work on Rewolucje.

Biography

Early life and studies

Mateusz was born in the city of Poznań on the 26th of July, 1976. According to Mateusz he started drawing comics at age 8 or 10. Having read many comics, such as Tytus by Henryk Chmielewski, he decided that he could also draw one. Mateusz asked for a notebook and started drawing his own He-Man comics. As a child Mateusz was very private and mostly hid his drawings from his parents.

Mateusz grew up in a time of political turmoil in Poland. When Mateusz was 11 his father was arrested due to his political activities, but was eventually released.

Mateusz started studying architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the Gdańsk University of Technology in 1996. He graduated there, from the Department of History of Architecture and Conservation of Antiques in the year 2001.

While studying at the university, Mateusz started to publish a zine called VormkfasA with a fellow student of architecture Łukasz Klimkiewicz. The name of the zine is a combination of the nicknames the two had: Mateusz went by Mask and Łukasz by Favor. The zine was published from 1997 until 2000. The zine's editorial staff also included Nikodem Skrodzki, Tomasz Sitek, Robert Żmuda and Paweł Szczepański.

During the publishing of Vormkfasa Mateusz also got his work onto various other magazines, such as AQQ, Krakers, and KKKomikkks. Among Mateusz's early successes were the Morfołaki comics, which had scripts written by Nikodem Skrodzki. Although the comics would continue to be published for a few years afterwards, the scripts were all written during his time at university.

Early career

After his studies Mateusz taught himself how to create animations in Flash, and worked as an animator. From 2002 onwards, he worked for Young Digital Planet, a publisher of digital educational materials.

While working in his dayjob as an animator, Mateusz also taught himself game development. He started to learn how to program to make games around 2001-2002, using The Games Factory program to make small experimental platformers. By 2003 Mateusz transitioned to Macromedia Flash, because it was more user friendly. Mateusz's first published game was a Squirrel Family game called Funky Forest, created in 2003.

Mateusz went on the publish many games on different platforms. His big breakthough happened in September 2005 with the creation of Submachine 1: The Basement. The game was originally published on Mateusz' own site Rewolucje.com, on the 15th of September 2005. However, after it was recommended on the popular game discussion site LazyLaces.com, the games surged in popularity and by the start of October Mateusz was forced to move the game onto a different mirroring site, to keep up with the demand. Mateusz soon created an extended version of the game and by the end of the year the game had seen 500,000 players.

Mateusz' comic book career also expanded during these years. After Morfołaki, Mateusz's Rewolucje comics, which are steampunk stories about fictional inventions in the industrial revolution, gained a lot of steam. The first of these stories was published in 2001, although they had already been presented at a comics convention in Łódź in 1999. The stories proved popular and by 2004, Mateusz published a full album called Parabola, with Elipsa and Monochrom following soon after. One of the stories in Monochrom caught the interest of the movie director Tomasz Bagiński and in September 2005 Mateusz announced that a movie adaptation of it was in the works. The short film The Kinematograph was released in 2009, and was an Oscar semi-finalist.

In 2001 Mateusz had started creating strips the using titular character Blaki, who goes through daily life making various philosophical observations about life. Some of these early strips had gotten published in various fanzines, but unfortunately those have become lost media. The first available published version is from Haiku Strip 4 in 2005. The character of Blaki caught the attention of Karol Konwerski in these early years and he liked the character so much he created several new scripts for the character, which Mateusz liked. This collaboration between the two lead to the publishing of the first Blaki album in 2005. This album also won album of the year award at the Łódź comic book festival in 2006.

While Mateusz and Karol continued to work together with comic book creation, Mateusz continued publishing games. At some point Karol provided a script for a new game as well. Covert Front is a series that follows an agent named Kara trying to solve mysteries in an alternate history World War I scenario. After it was published on July 18, 2007 it became another ratings hit, with over 250,000 daily players in early August, which sealed the deal for the pair's future collaboration.

Around the same time Mateusz had been working on Daymare Town, a pet project puzzle game he intended to be tricky to solve. After it was published on July 27, 2007 it became another surprise hit. A website dedicated to the game was set up in early August 2007 and Mateusz announced the series would continue. Along with Submachine, Covert Front and Daymare Town would be among Mateusz's flagship projects in the coming years.

Pastel Games

After the successes of Covert Front and Daymare Town, it was obvious that Mateusz's gaming career was on an upward trajectory. By late August 2007 Mateusz and Karol had founded a new company called Pastel Games. The company sold ad space in its games to gain money and also offered to make games for companies as a means of advertising. By 2008, Pastel Games was looking into hiring more programmers to work with them to produce games at a higher output.

From April 2008 onward Mateusz started developing his own proprietary gaming engine called Float engine. All his later games in the Flash era would be created with various versions of the engine, which saw multiple revisions.

In late 2008 Mateusz made the step of quitting this job as an animator and started working on creating games full-time.

Due to the success of mobile games in the global market, Pastel Games attempted to get onto this market as well, hiring new talent to code on the iPhone platform in 2008. The company released the iPhone game iSubmachine and a few other games in 2009. This venture was unsuccessful an within a year it drove the company to bankruptcy. In December 2009 Mateusz and Karol reformed the company and focused on Flash games, although along the years eleven mobile games were made. By 2013 Mateusz considered this venture a failure.

By 2009 the company had found some of its most prolific talent, including Maciej Palka, Kamil Kochanski and Barbara Jarosik. Although Karol was still in charge of writing, Maciej Palka's Fog Fall series and Kamil Kochanski's Great Escape series became staples of the company's output.

In 2012 Mateusz made the move to release HD versions of his games which were not available for free as all of his older games, but instead provided added quality for a fee. This move was successful and Mateusz continued adapting games into HD versions in the coming years.

In 2013 the sponsorship model that Pastel Games was working under went "belly up" and in 2014 MochiAds, a longtime advertisement provider for Pastel Games abruptly stopped as well. The company was forced to look for new advertisement services and small changes to 150 different games. These setbacks caused a slowing of the company's output. The company's last game was Eien in 2014. Pastel Games was disbanded in July 2015.

Through the time Pastel Games was operating Mateusz continued publishing new comic book albums in Blaki and Rewolucje series. He gained numerous awards both for his comics and his games.

Independent career

Mateusz launched his Patreon in May 2015. In only a few months Mateusz had managed to gather $1500 in monthly Patreon revenue, enabling his to support himself through Patreon alone.

After the release of Submachine 10: The Exit in 2015, Mateusz properly announced the end of his development in Flash, which was a dying software by this point in time. He stated his plans to move onto Game Maker and try to get onto the Steam market with a brand new product that would combine the hand painted style of Rewolucje, the puzzling of Submachine and the world of Daymare Town.

Around the New Year in 2017 Mateusz became an officially certified Apple developer and started porting all of his projects onto Mac OS X versions. He also released a new and final Morfołaki album after a long time.

In 2017 Mateusz also started properly planning "the Big Game", which would eventually be called Slice of Sea. He first got the idea from seeing the seaweed while replaying Daymare Town 4 and started from there. By March 2018 the game had entered pre-alpha stage. The game was eventually published on November 11, 2021.

In 2019, on a whim, Mateusz started developing a Submachine: Card Game. The game entered a testing phase quite quickly, and has been in the refining stange ever since then. The preliminary plan is to publish the game through a Kickstarter campaign, but that is in the future.

Since the release of Slice of Sea, Mateusz has been working on Submachine: Legacy, an upcoming re-release of his old games, with retouched graphics. Being supported by Patreon has enabled Mateusz to fully devote his time to the game and he has not released anything in 2022, the first such year in almost 20 years.

Family

Mateusz is the son of Tadeusz Skutnik (1947-2011) and Grażyna Skutnik. Grażyna Skutnik worked as a university librarian. Tadeusz Skutnik was a well-known journalist, writer, and poet.

According to Tadeusz Skutnik Mateusz's grandfather was a man with a great sense of humour, whereas his grandmother had none at all.

Mateusz also has an older sister, the visual artist Dominika Skutnik (b. 1971). Dominika started out as a painter, but has moved onto various art installations and sculptures. Her artwork has been shown in many countries, including Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, France, and South Korea.

Mateusz married Anna Jędrzejczak-Skutnik around 2006. Anna is a conservator, and a dancer and choreographer. She has also contributed scenarios for some of Mateusz's comic books.

Mateusz and Anna have two children.

Quotes

“ready to become immortalized within the sub?”
— Mateusz Skutnik

Pastel Forum

This link will take you to the Pastel Forum home page.

Pastel Forum is a phpBB forum that Skutnik has used to keep in touch with fans of his creative endeavors throughout his career. The forum grew out of his original website based in Poland, and eventually forum hosting was transfered to an American member. Mateusz still frequented the forum as an admin after he stopped hosting it. It has amassed a few hundred consistent members over time, though Skutnik has gradually re-focused to platforms such as Discord and Twitter for sharing news about his work. The forum is largely inactive, but it still holds records of pertinent information regarding Skutnik's work and conversations with fans regarding the Submachine games, as well as serving as a repository for all theories made about the Submachine games.

Links

Patreon • Twitter • Website • YouTube • itch.io

See also

• Forum posts
• Extra artwork related to Submachine, by Mateusz Skutnik