Seattle-based game studio Starform has revealed its debut project. Metalstorm is a free-to-play, 5 vs. 5 aerial combat game for PC and mobile, where players climb into the cockpits of fighter jets to battle each other online.
“It’s not your typical flight simulator,” Starform CEO Lou Fasulo told GeekWire. “It’s fast-paced, action-packed, and it breaks away from the simulation category to attract a wider audience.”
Starform was founded in 2018 by Fasulo, Taylor Daynes, Josh Rosen, and Jason English, all of whom formerly worked at the Seattle mobile studio Z2 before its acquisition by King in 2015.
The team at Starform took its time about deciding on what its debut project would be, as per a GeekWire interview in 2021, and it ended up as Metalstorm. Production of the game was partially funded by a 2021 seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. Fasulo announced the game officially via LinkedIn, including a link to Metalstorm’s page on the Epic Games Store.
Starform is currently a hybrid workplace, with 13 employees in Seattle and one in Idaho. The company has downtown Seattle office space.
There’s a rotating group of roughly 150 players who Fasulo calls “Starform Insiders.” They work closely with the development team to evaluate Metalstorm’s weekly updates.
“We think of the game as being authentic, but not entirely realistic,” Fasulo said. “Fans of air combat are going to recognize a lot of familiar elements and characteristics of plane physics, but they’re also going to see new things.”
‘It’s fast-paced, action-packed, and it breaks away from the simulation category to attract a wider audience.’
— Starform CEO Lou Fasulo
“[Metalstorm] might not please the most hardcore players, but we believe ultimately that we’re creating a more accessible and rewarding experience.”
Metalstorm is in open beta in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Mexico, and the Philippines, with Fasulo saying it’s been downloaded close to 1 million times, primarily through word of mouth.
“We chose a set of countries that felt like they would give us a good sampling of the different markets across the globe,” Fasulo said. “It helps us understand things like network characteristics, pricing, elasticity, how players are playing together, how the different time zones end up overlapping, these kinds of things.”
Starform is focused on polishing and iterating on Metalstorm’s core systems and gameplay, which includes testing it on more and different types of mobile devices and, eventually, localizing it to languages besides English. Part of the goal in the current process, according to Fasulo, is to make the PC and mobile editions of Metalstorm equally fun, with neither platform feeling like the “native” version of the game.
“If we’re going to spend our time putting our best work toward something, we want to be shooting for something amazing,” Fasulo said. “Building something legendary, as we say. We’re not really going to be happy with the average.”
