Revision 11

Overview

Square Glade Games is a small independent game studio based in Groningen, Netherlands, co-founded by Tobias "Tobi" Schnackenberg and Marc Volger. The studio is best known for its debut release Above Snakes (2023) and its upcoming second title Outbound, a cozy open-world exploration game centered on a solarpunk camper van. Despite a core team of fewer than a handful of full-time contributors, Square Glade has punched well above its weight: Outbound raised more than 265,000 euros on Kickstarter, surpassed 1.3 million Steam wishlists, and won the gamescom CommUnity Choice Award 2025 ahead of its May 2026 launch.

The studio was founded in 2022, during the final stretch of Above Snakes development, when Marc Volger joined Tobi on the project. Square Glade self-publishes on PC through Steam and the Epic Games Store, while console releases are handled by Silver Lining Interactive and physical retail editions by Tesura Games. In 2025 Square Glade also launched a small publishing arm of its own, with PackJack (by fellow Groningen studio Bytesnack) as its first signed title.

Team

Square Glade is structured as a tightly knit micro-team. Tobi remains the only full-time employee at the studio, with Marc, Nico, Tyler, and Michiel contributing in various roles across development, art, and audio. The team works primarily out of a co-working space in Groningen, where they first met Bytesnack, developer of PackJack.

Tobias "Tobi" Schnackenberg

Tobi is the creative and technical lead behind Square Glade Games. Born in Germany and now living in the Netherlands, he traces his path into game development back to his teenage years as a modder. He built custom levels for Super Mario, made maps and new game modes for Warcraft III using its World Editor, and spent time in Age of Empires' map tools. "I created levels in Super Mario, new maps and game modes for Warcraft III, and many others. I shared them with my friends and family and found that I enjoyed both the creative process and seeing people play something I made," he has said about that period.

The major moment came in 2019. Wanting to revisit his old Warcraft III projects, Tobi tried to reinstall the game, only to find that an updated client had broken compatibility with his maps. Instead of rolling back, he downloaded Unity and began prototyping. A university class on game development had already planted the seed: "Many years later, during my studies, I took a class that focused on game development. We had to create a small prototype of a game and I really loved it." By early 2021 he was working on his first commercial project, which would become Above Snakes.

Tobi has talked openly about the grind of solo development, the mental load of running a Kickstarter, and the importance of actually finishing projects. "Most projects die because the creator decides to move on to the next project without finishing the current one. Starting new projects is easy, but finishing and shipping existing ones is hard," he noted in one interview. He also cautions fellow developers against burning out: "There is nothing more important than your mental health and making a game is certainly not a sprint, it is a marathon." His online handle, @sir_tobi_, is how most of the Outbound community recognizes him.

Marc Volger

Marc Volger is Square Glade's co-founder and second developer. Before games, his background was strictly in applied AI: he studied Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in the Netherlands and worked as a software engineer on self-driving vehicle systems. He was already a keen gamer and discovered Above Snakes during its Kickstarter phase, reached out to Tobi, and ended up adding to the project. That collaboration became the foundation of Square Glade Games, which the two officially founded in 2022 as Above Snakes pushed toward release. Marc remains focused on code, with significant involvement in systems programming for Outbound.

Other Team Members

The Above Snakes soundtrack was composed by Tyler Zane (verified on Steam app 2326940). The composer for Outbound has not been publicly attributed; whether the same musical identity carries over will be confirmed once the in-game credits are publicly verified. Beyond this core group, the studio routinely contracts external collaborators for music, sound, and additional engineering work.

Studio History

From Modding to Unity (Pre-2021)

Square Glade's roots predate the studio by more than a decade. Tobi spent his teenage years in modding communities, layering homebrew Super Mario levels, Warcraft III custom maps and game modes, and Age of Empires scenarios on top of the commercial games he already loved. Warcraft III's World Editor, in particular, was his creative home for years. When he picked up Unity in 2019 after failing to reinstall Warcraft III cleanly, he was already fluent in level design, scripting logic, and iterating on player feedback, even if he had never shipped a commercial title.

Above Snakes and the Founding of Square Glade (2021 to 2023)

In early 2021 Tobi began prototyping Above Snakes as a solo project. The tile-based approach was originally a pragmatic workaround, not a design statement: "It started out as a compromise and an aesthetic feature and I later turned it into a gameplay mechanic with Above Snakes," he explained. The twist was that players would not explore a pre-generated world but instead build the map itself by placing tiles as they went. In January 2022 he launched a Kickstarter with a 26,000 euro goal; it ended at roughly 56,000 euros from more than 1,700 backers. During Steam Next Fest the demo attracted around 25,000 players, peaked at 561 concurrent users, and was played live by streamer CohhCarnage to around 18,000 viewers, which sharpened interest going into launch.

It was during this stretch that Marc reached out, joined the project, and co-founded Square Glade Games with Tobi. Above Snakes shipped on May 25, 2023, published by Crytivo, and went on to sell more than 60,000 copies within six months. That success gave the newly minted studio runway to prototype its next idea instead of immediately taking on contract work.

Outbound Revealed (2024 and Beyond)

Outbound was revealed publicly in February 2024 with a cinematic trailer. The August 2024 Kickstarter campaign cleared its 30,000 euro goal in less than two hours and finished at 265,679 euros from 5,197 backers, unlocking all ten announced stretch goals including camping, fishing, beekeeping, kite flying, additional mini games, a dog companion, and a character editor. From that point Square Glade became, at least temporarily, one of the most-watched indie studios in Europe, with its next release sitting inside Steam's top 50 most-wishlisted upcoming games.

Above Snakes (2023)

Above Snakes is Square Glade's debut title, a Western-inspired survival and base-building game in which players construct their world one isometric tile at a time. Set against a fictional American Old West backdrop, the game's story centers on a mysterious plague spreading across the land and turning people into the undead. Players explore multiple biomes, fight hostile wildlife and outlaws, gather resources, and build a homestead that grows alongside the world itself. Published by Crytivo, it launched on PC via Steam on May 25, 2023 and crossed 60,000 copies sold within six months, validating the then-tiny studio's approach and directly funding the more ambitious production of Outbound.

Outbound Development Timeline

The idea for Outbound came from a very specific moment. On a road trip from Germany to the Netherlands, Tobi spotted a camper van parked next to a row of solar panels and wind turbines and began imagining a game where your home was both mobile and self-sufficient. The visual direction then crystallized around The Line animation studio's 2021 Chobani short Dear Alice, a solarpunk vision of near-future farming scored by former Studio Ghibli collaborator Joe Hisaishi. That aesthetic, warm, hand-crafted, optimistic, became Outbound's guiding star. The table below tracks the public milestones of development.

Design Philosophy

Tobi has spelled out Square Glade's design philosophy in several interviews, and the same themes recur across Above Snakes and Outbound: familiarity as a ramp, novelty as a hook, and finishing what you start. His rule of thumb is that a good game is "about 50 to 70 percent known stuff, with 30 percent unknown." The known part lets players settle in without a tutorial wall; the unknown part is what earns word of mouth. Above Snakes' tile-builder twist on survival and Outbound's camper-van core loop both slot into that framework.

A second principle he returns to is the habit of "no zero-percent days." Every working day, something has to move forward, even if it is a small backlog ticket, a bug fix, or a single animation tweak. The practice is aimed at avoiding the trap he has described in interviews of letting projects collapse under their own weight: "Most projects die because the creator decides to move on to the next project without finishing the current one. Starting new projects is easy, but finishing and shipping existing ones is hard." That attitude shaped the design of the building system in Above Snakes, which he wanted to feel "very intuitive and simple while maintaining creative freedom," and it continues to inform Outbound's emphasis on low-friction, hands-on interaction with the camper van and its surrounding world.

There is also a personal thread running through Outbound's concept. Tobi has said the game is partly an answer to a daydream most people recognize but few can act on: "Many people like the idea of going travelling with a camper van. And like myself, many people can't do it because they have responsibilities such as jobs or family or financial constraints." The game is built to scratch that itch without asking the player to quit their job.

Publishing Partnerships

For Above Snakes, Square Glade worked with Crytivo as publisher. Tobi has said publicly that, in hindsight, he is happy with that partnership: "I ended up signing with Crytivo and I am really happy with that." For Outbound the studio decided to change tack and self-publish on PC, taking direct control of marketing, community, and store relationships on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Consoles and physical media, however, are areas where the small team lacked the in-house bandwidth, so Outbound relies on specialized partners for those releases.

In parallel, Square Glade launched its own small publishing arm in 2025. The studio's first signed project is PackJack, a TCG booster-pack-opening rogue-like developed by Bytesnack, whom Tobi and Marc met at their shared co-working space in Groningen. PackJack is slated for a 2026 release and is intended as a proof of concept for Square Glade's willingness to back other small Dutch teams using the same playbook they used on their own games.

Awards and Recognition

Outbound's reception turned Square Glade into one of the most visible indie studios in Europe during 2025. Unity featured the team in an official blog post after they won the gamescom CommUnity Choice Award in Cologne. This points to Outbound's use of Unity 6 and the Universal Render Pipeline to achieve its painterly, almost Pixar-like visual style. The 17th Unity Awards nominated Outbound for Most Anticipated Game, pitching it directly against larger studio projects.

By the time the console demo launched in April 2026, Outbound had crossed 1.3 million Steam wishlists, with additional tens of thousands of wishlists across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The free PC demo had been downloaded and played by more than 500,000 people and held Very Positive user reviews on Steam. For a studio with a single full-time employee and roughly five contributors total, those numbers place Square Glade in the same conversation as mid-sized European independents, and they shape how the team has approached the May 2026 launch: carefully, one day at a time, with Tobi's "no zero-percent days" rule still pinned to the wall.