Maschinen-Mensch is an independent game studio from Berlin founded in 2014 by Johannes Kristmann and Riad Djemili. We love creating games using a mix of carefully hand-crafted elements and procedural gameplay to create unique experiences for players. Our first game Curious Expedition sold more than 500.000 copies across all platforms.
As a studio we aim to offer opportunities to local artists and creators and strive to be a part of the vivid, wonderful Berlin indie scene through collaborations, events and our shared office space and collective, Saftladen.
Check out the press kit for pictures, logos and more information.
The Team
Riad Djemili (CEO)
As a kid, Riad’s favorite book was a board game manual. So, designing games was just the next logical step for him. After studying computer science in Berlin he worked in AAA development for over 7 years on titles such as Spec Ops: The Line and Dead Island 2. He co-founded Maschinen-Mensch with Johannes to create games that explore social dynamics of the real world. Riad loves to play chess, ride his bike around town and photography.
CURIOUS FACT: One of things that fascinates Riad the most is data visualization and he is constantly designing systems, rules and tools that help him manage his life.
Johannes Kristmann (Game Director)
Jo has been working in games for over 10 years before co-founding Maschinen-Mensch with Riad. When not thinking of new weird creatures, costumes and characters and being a vocal and important part of the Berlin game dev scene, Johannes spends as much time as he can with his family. He is an outdoor guy through and through and loves gardening, hiking and strolling through the forest.
CURIOUS FACT: Jo has a surprising talent for painting nails and loves to wear his designs around the office.
Amaury Butaux (Game Designer)
Amaury started making games in 6th grade with a very good friend and knew that he wanted to work in games ever since. He has a strong interest for both technical and creative fields. Indeed, he briefly started his career as a programmer but switched over to game design quickly. Amaury is always eager to find out about new things!
CURIOUS FACT: Amaury has a nice collection of dungarees he loves to wear.
Carolina Romano (3D Artist)
Before joining Maschinen-Mensch, Carolina worked for several years as a freelance 3D artist, mainly in the video game industry. More recently she's also been working as a lecturer and has been organising the Berlin Blender meetup, trying to create a more diverse community around it. She spends the rest of her time studying anthropology.
CURIOUS FACT: When she was a kid Carolina used to make games with her sister, using Deluxe Paint Animator frames as levels.
Christoph Plewe (Business Operations Manager)
Christoph first came into contact with the game dev scene while writing his MA thesis on newsgames. He never thought about creating games himself, but was led by curiosity and a love of creating entertaining educational content. After a really successful first game-jam project (incidentally made with his now-colleagues Felix and Daniel from Codecks) he was completely hooked. Before joining Maschinen-Mensch, he worked for the game association and created the gamecampus and the StartUP! Guide to help people break into the games industry.
CURIOUS FACT: Christoph has a degree in archaeology and is fascinated by ancient musical instruments.
Felix Szczesny (Game Designer)
Felix started making games in 6th grade with a very good friend and knew that he wanted to work in games ever since. He grew up in the south of France and came to Berlin after finishing high school. He immediately fell in love with Berlin's game dev scene, where he already met many of Maschinen-Mensch's members. Before joining Maschinen-Mensch as a Game Designer, he studied Game Design at HTW Berlin. Felix is also working on his own game: Yeogi Jeogi, a rhythmic puzzler.
CURIOUS FACT: Before studying Game Design he worked for a caterer and once made dinner Angela Merkel.
Florian Smolka (VFX Artist)
Flo has to thank his mom for his career path because she stumbled upon a newspaper article about game design studies. In university he met the people who later founded Mimimi Games (RIP) and worked there for 13 years until they closed their doors. In 2015 Flo met Riad during a gamedev exchange in Indonesia and followed Maschinen-Mensch ever since.
CURIOUS FACT: Flo worked at a circus for children and an adventure playground.
Helmut Ofori (3D Character Artist)
As a kid, Helmut have always been enthusiastic about video games, their worlds, and their stories. But the real hook started when he was watching game one and saw an article about God of War 3 by Simon Krätschmer. After that, he used up all his savings to buy a PS3 and God Of War 3 and played the game endlessly. He never considered video games as a career and never thought he would be on the other side at some point. 10 years later, by chance, his best friend dragged him to an open day at a university that was about game development. After that day he had the option to either do boxing professionally or learn how to make video games and if you are reading this you know what he chose to do.
CURIOUS FACT: He was a relatively good boxer in the Bundesliga before he started with 3D and game development! Also, his favorite dish is popcorn! Yes, popcorn is a dish for him and he can eat it all the time without stop!
Isaac Ashdown (Technical Director)
Isaac specializes in gameplay programming and loves to turn design into realities that people can actually play. After working on Dead Island 2 for several years, Isaac co-founded his own studio, inbetweengames, and created All Walls Must Fall, a turn-based love letter to time travelling, techno and Berlin’s club scene. Free time is for walking through forests with his husband and his dog.
CURIOUS FACT: Asking Isaac for curious facts about himself gives him a real sense of Existential Dread. Don’t do that!
Jira Duguid (Technical Artist)
Jira grew up in sector 5 of Midgar before finding her way by train to Berlin. Jira initially was an animator but wanted to make her animations more interactive so began working with game engines and fell in love with it. She has worked in video game art collectives for many years and is now also working with two collaborators in game/art label Fantasia Malware.
CURIOUS FACT: Every summer Jira collects moss in the hopes of starting a moss garden and by every autumn she has committed accidental moss manslaughter :(
Katarina Czikorova (UI Designer)
Before coming to Maschinen-Mensch, Katarina was working as a designer and lecturer in motion design. For her PhD she was actually researching how animation can be used as an educational tool. Working in games sounded like something new and exciting so she decided to join our team. Katarina is happiest when seeing the first movements of a character on screen.
CURIOUS FACT: Katarina enjoys going to the movies alone and tries to go to the theater at least once a week (unless there’s a pandemic going on).
Leonie Wolf (3D Technical Animator)
Leonie has been working as a 3D Technical Animator since 2018. She's been involved in the release of 20+ games for which she produced 3D graphics and animations and is continuously working on several game projects as an employee and freelancer. Aside from her day job, Leonie is working as a mentor, event speaker & organiser, focussing on bringing women and marginalized groups of developers closer to the game industry. She loves sneakers, fitness and squirrels.
CURIOUS FACT: In her retail days, Leonie once sold a pair of 'New Balance M1500BK Black Made In England' to Macklemore.
Magaret Dax (Backend Programmer)
Margaret took her first steps into the game industry building online services for Borderlands 2 at Gearbox Software, and has been unable to escape games ever since. After many years in Chicago working as a gameplay programmer, she learned German during the pandemic and came to Berlin. Margaret cares deeply for user experience, player and developer alike, and is excited to bring her skills and experience to Maschinen-Mensch!
CURIOUS FACT: Margaret first learned to program in her youth, building devices with Expression 2 to torment players of a Gary's Mod RP server she co-admin'd..
Maryse Heilig (Concept Artist)
Having never played a computer game to that day, Maryse miraculously landed a spot at Game Design HTW which then led her on the thrilling path of becoming a concept artist. Fast forward a few years and she's worked as a freelancer on all kinds of projects - from designing a VR escape game to making time traveling musician player characters and teaching the next generation. All she needs in life is a cozy blanket, nice people to bring her snacks from time to time and a good internet connection.
CURIOUS FACT: Maryse once spent six months watching HTTYD every.single.day.
Philip Feller (Animator)
After getting his BA in technical journalism, Philip decided to try his hands on game development. Joining up with his best friend and learning everything from scratch they released the weird and spooky games Penko Park & Wunderdoktor. 7 years later he was looking for a change of scenery, and figured that Maschinen-Mensch would be the perfect fit for his expertise.
CURIOUS FACT: Philip used to play Call of Duty 1 and 2 on a professional level and was known as one of the deadliest rifle players at the time.
Rico Possienka (Programmer)
Rico grew up in Berlin Kreuzberg in the 90s. Fascinated by the German demo and hacker scene, from a young age he wanted to find out how computer graphics were programmed. After teaching himself Turbo Pascal, Assembler and Java he was set on becoming a game programmer. Following the death of his father Rico ditched his maths studies and worked as web designer until he scored a position as a game programmer at a Berlin indie studio. In his spare time Rico plays table tennis and works on his own game engine. His favourite game series is Silent Hill.
CURIOUS FACT: Rico was mostly raised by two mothers.
Sindy Krinke (QA Tester)
A passionate gamer that played a lot of Sims 3 and RTC3 in her childhood. This resulted in a strong interest in understanding how games work and what mechanisms and technologies are behind them. She has a strong preference for different game genres, especially management, survival and story-based games. She is also fascinated by rich stories and character developments that allow her to dive deep into the lives of the respective protagonists.
CURIOUS FACT: Sindy is writing a book and the biographies of the characters have become more extensive than she expected.
Stina Flodström (Art Director)
Stina loves the mix of art, tech and problem solving that game development offers. Some of her earliest memories is sitting in front of her brother's Commodore 64 playing a forgotten circus game. After art school she switched to 3D and has since worked in games creating environments and setting up procedural systems for a variety of projects. Shecomes from the north of Sweden and loves being in the forest and all kinds of winters ports. She has a continous stream of different side projects going on like swing, learning ceramics, making lino prints and woodworks. Though recently mostly abstract crayon drawings on big papers.
CURIOUS FACT(S): Stina used to compete in slalom as a kid, has four older brothers and worked on a VR project developed together with NASA.
Talita Rhein (Producer)
Talita has been into games for quite some time. In 2016 her passion became more serious when she started writing articles and reviews for the Brazilian blog Jogazera, which lead to working on game projects as a marketing manager and then to production roles. In 2018 she participated to the monthly Berlin Mini Game jam where she created the first prototype for Dogo Dash, a card game that after further development was successfully funded on Kickstarter. You should get a copy, it's really good!
CURIOUS FACT: Talita does not enjoy eating fruits, she finds their texture weird. She drinks lots of juices instead.
Curious Corner
- Our company name Maschinen-Mensch means “machine-human”. The first name that we landed on was “HIC SVNT LEONES”. We prepared all the company foundation papers with that name and then got second thoughts at the last moment and had to come up with a new name within half an hour. If you’ve ever started a company or project then you know that coming up with a name is probably the hardest part of it all.
- Before Curious Expedition was released, back in 2014 Riad and Jo created a small game for the Ludum Dare 29 game jam titled Planet Corp. — you can play it here (but don't tell anyone).
Website Credits
This website was designed by our former Executive Producer Lorenzo Pilia. Daniel Berndt coded it. Dennis Kogel wrote the first draft of the texts and helped collect curious facts for the various Curious Corners.
Special Thanks
The creation of this website was supported by Kreativ-Transfer with funds by the representatives of culture and media of the German government. Let us say that again in German: Gefördert durch Kreativ-Transfer, aus Mitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.
