Arvi Teikari

Arvi Teikari, who works under the name Hempuli, is a Finnish independent game developer based in Helsinki. He got into making games as a child, after a schoolmate introduced him to game-creation tools, and spent years releasing small freeware and experimental titles before turning the hobby into a job. His first proper commercial release was Environmental Station Alpha, a retro-styled Metroid-like platformer about a robot exploring an abandoned space station, which started life as a freeware project in 2011 and came out on Steam in 2015, the same year he set up his company Hempuli Oy.

His breakout came from a game jam. At the 2017 Nordic Game Jam he built a small prototype of Baba Is You, a puzzle game in which the rules of each level are physical word blocks that the player pushes around to rewrite how the world works. The prototype won the jam, and while still a University of Helsinki student he expanded it into a full game, which won Best Student Game and Excellence in Design at the 2018 Independent Games Festival. Baba Is You launched in March 2019 on PC and Nintendo Switch, later reached mobile, and received a free level editor update with online level sharing in 2021. It went on to win design awards at both the D.I.C.E. Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards.

Teikari handles code, design and art himself and collaborates with composers for audio. He has mostly built his games in Clickteam Multimedia Fusion 2, more recently using Löve2D. Alongside his own work he was part of the small Nolla Games team behind the physics-driven roguelite Noita. He still describes game development as primarily a hobby and continues to make small experimental games for jams, sharing them on itch.io.