Pencil box characters come to life in a series of cutesy, cartoony games

Sweet Summer is a stationery maker from Thailand. It’s got the cutest prints, pastel-perfect products, and the most adorable characters you could hope to see on a pencil box. It has also published two mobile games since last year. So what made Sweet Summer turn to gaming?

Managing director Alissara Chavalvechakul says that revenue is not the company’s main motivation. “We started doing mobile games because we love our characters and we would like to share them with the rest of the world,” she says. “We’ve got a lot more ideas for our characters.”

On a whole, Sweet Summer’s characters are well received in Thailand, where it originates from. Its products are stocked in department stores across the country and the company even receives fan mail. Its characters include cute critters like the “Long Neck Gang”, consisting of a giraffe, a gazelle, and an alpaca, Kuro the whale, a penguin and a little yellow bird Hoshio and Kamomo, and an ermine couple in Mina and Koko.

Founded by Chavalvechakul and Rathakorn Prompimpa, Sweet Summer began operations at the end of 2011 producing stationery like notebooks, planners, book bags, and pencil cases. It also ventured a little ways into fashion by printing its characters on scarves. In 2014, it established a joint venture with the Thai game studio Blue Boat and developed Kuro Jump, a simple endless jumper similar to Vietnam’s Jump & Jump.

Kuro Jump eventually became the third most popular overall app on the Thai App Store. With one success under their belt, Sweet Summer and Blue Boat continued work on another game, a collection of mini arcade games called Sweet Summer World Challenge that is already available worldwide on iOS and Android.

Dividing up the pie

Just how did a joint venture between a stationery maker and a game development studio come about? It’s definitely not a marriage that happens often. But Sweet Summer’s cute characters lend themselves well to other media.

Indie game studio Blue Boat is just three staff strong and has been working on non-violent games for all ages for almost two years now. It focuses on social, casual, and educational games, and boasts a match-3 Facebook game called Ore Blitz, which it claims has almost 3 million players so far.

“Sweet Summer creates cute characters and beautiful content which match our genre,” says developer Jessada Charoenkitvorawut. “Therefore we decided to work together in Sweet Summer World Challenge with a goal to create the world’s first cute social mini-games game.”

Blue Boat was founded the same year as Sweet Summer, when Charoenkitvorawut and his college friends won first prize at the National Software Contest with a real-time strategy game built around the Songkran festival. The project was discontinued, but Charoenkitvorawut was keen to continue making family-friendly cute games. He found some partners to work on Ore Rush and its subsequent Ore Blitz, then founded Blue Boat.