We aren't a stealth-mode startup dreaming about slots. We're a small team of veterans quietly building the studio the industry has been both waiting for (and afraid of).
Most studios need forty people to ship a game. We think three of the right people, wearing the right exoskeleton, with the right operator relationships, can outproduce them. Commercial, technology, and Chair — that's the room.
Hip Durian is Felipe's brainchild. He designed the engine, wrote the maths, and set the creative direction — the studio exists because he built it. Turns napkin ideas into playable prototypes in a week.
Operator, author, and long-time student of what makes players stay. Runs strategy, commercial, and certification.
A senior industry figure who brings three decades of operator scale and product judgement to the room. Name to follow.
Hip Durian began the way most good things do — three people, one long conversation, and a shared frustration with the state of the shelf.
Between us, we'd shipped, marketed, or licensed hundreds of slot titles. And yet the games we personally wanted to play kept not existing. Somebody had to build them.
So we did what our industry rarely does. We started small. We built the engine before the roadmap. We designed the maths before the artwork.
Today Hip Durian is a lean, deliberately senior team. No committees, no legacy tech, no reason to compromise. Just the games we've always wanted to make, made differently.
Most studios sequence design, build, math, art, and compliance. We collapse them. Every game moves through the same five stages — in parallel, not in queue.
Every project starts from a specific player observation, not a theme brief.
Concept is one mechanic and one feeling. Names are screened before a pixel is drawn.
Our proprietary toolchain turns a concept into a playable prototype in days, not months.
Art, animation, and sound are one system — tested inside the live prototype, not delivered as static comps.
Every launch feeds the next concept, informed by our own market intelligence feeds.
The full method — with the tools, prompts, and the workflow that makes five stages run in parallel — lives in a separate place, for those who need to look under the hood.
Read the full method at hipdurian.aiIf a mechanic can't survive a real player's attention, it doesn't ship. Simple as that.
We stay senior and stay small. Our toolchain is the exoskeleton. It does the heavy lifting; we do the designing.
We treat certification like typography — an invisible discipline that separates good from great.
Familiar mechanics. Unfamiliar games. We build on what players already understand, then bend it into something they haven't seen.
