This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 19, September 2025

Loyalty is a difficult thing. Some have it for themselves, others for a leader, and others still for a place. Avitium, Studio MiK’s 2025 card battler, asks its audience to stand behind their ideals or die trying.

Set in the final days of a dying kingdom, the player controls a knight, sworn to the protection of a place he is considering leaving for good.

Using a deck of 20 cards that can be added to and customized through a trick taking minigame, players battle to assert themselves and their loyalties to king, country, and themselves.

Megan Kennedy, the project’s producer and game designer, attributed that narrative concept to immigration.

“All three of us on the core development team have pretty strong ties to immigration, either being first- or second-generation immigrants ourselves,” they said. “The idea of ties to a place and its people and when or if you ever make the decision to leave was definitely the concept that ended up forming the narrative foundation of our game.”

Avitium is a card battler at its core, but it’s also a turn-based RPG with a point-and-click exploration style and painterly, diorama-like environments.

Besides those games, much of the aesthetic of the final project is rooted in 17 and 18^th century Polish art, including original music in the vein of Chopin; or what Kennedy called “Fauxpin.”

The game’s opening lines are even drawn directly from Frank Bidart’s 1981 poem “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” about a Polish dancer.

“We took a lot of influence from 1600s – 1700s Polish art, music and literature,” they said. “That era and aesthetic led to a lot of our decisions with regard to art direction.”

The resulting visual and narrative style is tight and well-developed, something that can likely be credited to the small team behind Studio MiK. Three in total: Kennedy, narrative designer and producer Kisa Rodriguez, and artist Iwo Kmiecik.

Development began as a capstone project for the three, with the first prototype coming together at the end of their junior years, then work on the more realized final project spanning from Aug.  2024 to May 2025.

“In retrospect, doing an RPG as our senior capstone project was a really ambitious task,” Kennedy said. “But we were lucky enough to have a very well-balanced skillset, where each of us had a specialization but could contribute to other tasks as needed.”

Kennedy also said that most of their ability to stay on target and within a reasonable scope is attributed to Rodriguez’s work as a producer as well as their divide and conquer workflow.

Each team member worked mostly separately on the project, often being handed a task and then disappearing for a while before returning with a finished product to “many oohs and aahs from the rest of the team.”

That workflow may seem challenging or isolating for those used to larger teams, but Kennedy said that there was little hassle due to the team’s trust in one another.

“We work well enough together that we generally trust each other to be able to run with a small amount of direction,” they said.

Each of the team members hopes to leverage this experience toward an industry career, but that won’t stop them from making independent games with each other.

“We have some plans for another card-based game in the future,” Kennedy said. “But we’re planning on narratively and visually taking it in a bit of a different direction next time.”

Get Avitium on Steam at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3721560/Avitium/