Kamibox is an independent German video game developer founded by Philipp Stollenmayer. Stollenmayer is the sole employee of the company, which creates almost exclusively mobile games. Some of Kamibox's games have received awards for their design, including an Apple Design Award. Kamibox games often have a philosophical element to them, such as see/saw and Sometimes You Die, which explore the concept of death in video games.
Stollenmayer also designs papercraft models under the Kamibox branding and had done for some time before he started producing games. Stollenmayer's background in paper modelling often lends a more experimental lean to Kamibox's games.
Origin Kamibox was originally founded by Philipp Stollenmayer as a papercraft company but developed into a video game designer after Stollenmayer learned to code. The name Kamibox comes from the Japanese word for paper, .
The studio is run solely by Stollenmayer. Born in 1991, he now lives in Riedstadt, Germany. Before creating games, Stollenmayer took a bachelor's degree in communication design at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences from 2011 and a master's degree in information design in Würzburg. It was during the third semester of his communication design course that he first started coding games using Lua, at the age of 21.
Games and applications
Stollenmayer codes all the games released by Kamibox in Solar2D (formerly CoronaSDK) although he has experimented with Unity, Xcode and Swift. Kamibox games are two-dimensional and diverse in their genres, with an emphasis on original and eccentric graphic designs inspired by his background in papercraft. As of 2022, Kamibox has produced or contributed to 25 games that are (or have been) available to download: Tiny Paper Zoo (2012) - Kamibox's first app. It is essentially an instruction manual to create papercraft animals. The designs are sorted into three difficulty levels; some designs include a seal, a penguin, a zebra, an elephant and a panda. There are options to either print or trace the outline of the design. Awesome Paper Toys (2013) - in the vein of Tiny Paper Zoo, the app is a collection of instructions for building papercraft models. There are nine models to make, with three categories of difficulty. Estimated times to build the models range from five minutes to an hour. What The Frog (2013) - Kamibox's first game. What the Frog is a physics game where you control the movement of the game's titular character "What", a frog. To do this, the game uses the iPhone's sensors to detect tapping and shaking of the device which it uses to control the movement of the character. What the Frog's design is inspired by a low-resolution television set. The aim of the game is to complete quests which unlocks new characters to play as. cyro (2013) - in cyro players control a duo of creatures that carry a plank through a rotating maze. The goal of the game is get the plank through the maze in order to make a bridge to the moon. Touching the walls of the maze causes the loss of a life (of which you have two). cyro has a minimalist design. The game has 48 levels and is partly inspired by Kuru Kuru Kururin. Sometimes You Die (2014) - similar to the roguelike genre of games, Sometimes You Die is a platformer puzzle game based around the use of dead bodies to complete puzzles. After dying, the player's body remains on the map and can be used as a platform. The game's visuals was in part inspired by the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. It received favorable reviews on release and was praised for its philosophical approach to game design; it was the most downloaded game on the US and German app stores for a period of time. Stollenmayer stated that the game only took a month to be coded; it was made after he finished his college tuition. The game was originally going to be called Rebirth, but Stollenmayer decided that name sounded too much like a first person shooter.