Meet the 17-year-olds behind Paisley Games

Tobi Hahn, August Polite and Josh Berg are best friends and video game connoisseurs. After they registered paisleygames.com in October 2014, their passion went into production.
On Thursdays, you’ll find them working on their new game, “Swat Team,” in the Philly Game Forge studio on Chestnut Street. On Tuesdays, you’ll find them programming in a local deli, coding music and designing digital art. Other afternoons, they’ll be working at various game studios around town, joking with each other like the high schoolers they are.
Swat Team, a social, two-player game in which competitors face off as bugs and swatters, entered the greenlighting process on Steam in April after Paisley Games finalized modifications to the game.
The team created Swat Team during a 72-hour video game programming contest organized by Ludum Dare in late 2014. Hahn, Polite and Berg had three days to program any game of their devising, and so the bug vs. swatter game was born.
The simplicity suited them.
“We started with something ambitious,” said Polite, the company’s digital artist. “We tried to make a full game, right out of the gate.” Their first prospective game had 3D capabilities and a plot-driven story mode with characters for whom the player could grow sympathetic.
But alas, this task was too unfamiliar and complex for three first-timers, so they started with a fresh approach.
“These multiplayer games are hard work,” said Hahn. “But it’s immediately rewarding when you can see people in a room, friends or strangers, playing your game.”
They saw that in droves during Philly Tech Week 2015 presented by Comcast, debuting Swat Team at #PTW15’s Arcade @ Dilworth kickoff event.

“Showing it a Philly Tech Week was amazing,” Hahn said. “We got to see thousands of people playing our game and enjoying it. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”
So if Swat Team surpasses the greenlighting process in future weeks, what’s next for Hahn, Polite and Berg?
“We’re going to make our money back,” said Polite. The group’s endeavors have been self-funded and what money they’ve spent so far will be earned back from the game’s unfixed price of $2-$5.
Until then, the Paisley Games guys will keep on working. They may revisit their first uncompleted project to create what was once too ambitious.
“We’re doing what we love,” they said. And they’re taking the industry one level at a time.