How Hannah Farrugia, Antony Nizamoglou, and the rest of the team at Llamaplay are building bold, emotionally resonant worlds from Malta
Some companies begin with a terrific business plan. But Llamaplay? Not so much. The company began with two self-described gaming geeks, a shared appetite for experimentation, and a wonderfully ambitious habit: making a new game every month.
For Hannah and her partner, Antony, video games were never merely a pastime. Gaming was part of daily life. They owned the consoles, loved the culture, and, because both were game developers and natural tech experimenters, they were just as fascinated by building games as by playing them. Only a few weeks after meeting, they moved in together and began creating at a pace that would eventually change the direction of their lives.
From a “Llama Concept” to a Real Studio
Before there was a formal company, there was the Llama Concept: a playful identity that reflected how Hannah and Antony saw themselves. Llamas, in all their glory, were a little crazy. They broke things, tested strange ideas, and kept experimenting until something new appeared. The name captured the creative energy that would become the studio’s signature.
The pair sharpened that instinct through game jams (game-development hackathons) in which participants build a playable game in just 48 hours. Those intense creative sprints soon became a game-a-month rhythm at home. Eventually, the question became impossible to ignore: If they were already making games together this consistently, why not build a company around it?
They founded Llamaplay in 2021. What began as a shared passion project became a Malta-based game-development studio grounded in curiosity, courage, and the refusal to accept conventional limits too quickly.
The Courage to Stop Waiting
During its first few years, Llamaplay primarily operated as a work-for-hire studio, supporting larger game companies and contributing development expertise to outside projects. It was valuable work, and some of those games performed well. But Hannah and Antony wanted to bring their own ideas directly to players without compromising the original vision. Cut out the middleman, so to speak.
So they made a decisive leap of faith. They moved away from relying solely on contract work and became a Steam developer and publisher in their own right. Since making that shift, the small team (Hannah, Antony, and support from two students) has launched two games on Steam and moved toward a third release, a pace that is especially striking in an industry where a single title can take one or two years to complete.
Hannah describes the studio as hard-headed in the best sense of the phrase. Llamaplay is willing to test the boundary of what others think is realistic, protect the heart of an idea, and keep going after a fall. “We think we can fly,” she says, “but even if we fall, we just keep trying to fly anyway.”
Entertainment With an Emotional Afterlife
What most clearly separates Llamaplay, however, isn’t simply how quickly the team creates. It’s why they create.
The studio wants every game to leave a mark. A Llamaplay title should make someone laugh, cry, worry, reflect, or see the world through a different pair of eyes. The team discards ideas constantly because novelty alone is not enough. The concept must contain something worth feeling, and something worth remembering after the screen goes dark and the game ends.
That philosophy comes to life in When the Embers Wake, a third-person narrative adventure centered on a red panda. Two stories unfold in parallel: a human narrator recounts what happened to her in the past while the red panda experiences a related journey in the present. Through themes of grief, environmental destruction, and survival, the game invites players to develop greater empathy for wildlife and the realities animals face. Llamaplay is also using the game to help promote an animal shelter, extending its message beyond the story itself.
For Hannah, seeing a streamer become emotional while playing the demo is no accident. It’s evidence that the story has reached someone. In a world overflowing with forgettable micro-sized content, that response matters. If a player begins to cry or panics because they fear what may happen next, the player is invested, and the game has created a genuine human connection. That’s the whole point.
A Tentacle, a Choice, and a Question of Identity
Llamaplay’s purpose-driven storytelling does not mean its games are solemn. Sometimes the doorway to a meaningful question is delightfully bizarre.
Prescription: Madness is a dark-comedy visual novel in which the player takes the role of Cthulhu’s tentacle. The setup is immediately intriguing, but beneath the humor lies a story about autonomy, identity, and choosing one’s own purpose. After detaching from Cthulhu and entering the human world, the character befriends hospital interns and doctors while wrestling with the mission it was given: destroy the world. Ultimately, the player faces a choice between obeying someone else’s design and forging an independent path.
That combination, an unforgettable hook wrapped around an emotionally intelligent core, is central to Llamaplay’s creative identity. The games can be weird, funny, surprising, and accessible while still asking players to think about empathy, belonging, responsibility, and who gets to decide the life they lead.
Building Something Bigger in Malta
Looking ahead, Hannah’s dream is both global and deeply local. Llamaplay wants to become more sustainable in an intensely competitive industry, grow its brand, and create games that reach larger audiences without losing their emotional power. A blockbuster success would be welcome, of course, but scale matters because it would allow the studio’s stories to reach more people.
At home in Malta, the founders also hope to help strengthen a still-small game-development startup community. Malta has talented, creative students studying game development, yet many may feel they must pursue opportunities abroad or work remotely. A growing Llamaplay could create more local opportunities, hire Maltese talent, and help demonstrate that ambitious, original games can be built from the island and enjoyed around the world.
Even the prospect of someday selling the company does not change the deeper calling. Hannah believes she and her partner would still make games afterward. This is not simply the venture they happen to operate; creating games has become their default way of moving through the world and making sense of it all.
What if video games were somehow removed from the equation?
“I think I would write or publish novels. That’s another form of storytelling that can carry people into unfamiliar lives. Hannah says proudly.”
Keep Trying to Fly
Llamaplay’s story is a reminder that meaningful innovation often begins in play: two people follow their curiosity, make strange things, learn quickly, and eventually realize they have built the beginnings of a company. But play alone is not what gives the studio its staying power. Purpose does.
Hannah and Antony aren’t interested in filling a few spare hours and disappearing from memory. They want to create worlds that entertain while opening an “empathy door,” games that help players feel more deeply, question inherited assumptions, and carry something valuable back into real life.
That is an ambitious standard for a small studio. But it’s also exactly the kind of ambition on which Llamaplay was founded: experiment boldly, protect the vision, make people feel something, and no matter how many times gravity intervenes, keep trying to fly.
Interested in Connecting With the Llama Play Team?
Email Hannah Farrugia @ hannahfarrugia@llamaplay.com