Traplight raises $500,000 ahead of What on Earth!

    We look at Helsinki as Finland’s hub of gaming, but that isn’t to say that other studios in the country aren’t making some noise. Today it was announced that Tampere, Finland’s Traplight Games has raised a $500,000 round led by Sunstone Capital, Finnvera Venture Capital, East Wings, and Henric Suuronen among other angel investors.

    Digging into those investors a little closer, you can see that there’s some smart money getting behind the project. Sunstone’s Nikolaj Newholm has served as an advisor to Minecraft, which was recently acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Additionally Henric Suuronen, who ran Nonstop Games (acquired by King recently) has put money into Grand Cru, Ministry of Games, PlayRaven as well as games analytics company Omniata.

    Traplight is developing their first title, What on Earth!, which is a 2D physics based mobile game somewhere between the PC classic Elastomania and the creation elements of Supernauts (putting me in their target audience). According to Traplight, the content and challenges will come from the players themselves, which sounds like a cool mindset to have.

    “Letting players create great user-generated content on mobile and tablet is difficult”, Nikolaj Nyholm from Sunstone Capital says. “Traplight has created an editor which is genuinely fun to use with amazing results to show.”

    Their game is expected to launch in early 2015.

    You can see a little teaser of the game and social elements in the trailer below: