Kot-in-Action Creative Artel is an independent video game company

Independent video game development

Independent video game development is the process of creating video games without the financial support of a video game publisher. While large firms can create independent games, they are usually designed by an individual or a small team of as many as ten people, depending on the complexity of the...

  headquarterd in Del Rio, Texas

Del Rio, Texas

Del Rio is a border city in and the county seat of Val Verde County, Texas, United States.. Del Rio is connected with Ciudad Acuña via the Lake Amistad Dam International Crossing and Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge...

 and founded in 2008 by Alexander Zubov. Consisting of a core team of three people, they developed the Steel Storm

Steel Storm

Steel Storm is an independent video game series developed by Kot-in-Action Creative Artel using the free software DarkPlaces engine that were released for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms...

series for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 platforms.

On November 25, 2010 , Unigine Corp

Unigine Corp

Unigine Corp is an international software development company with offices in Tomsk, Russia and Prague, Czech Republic. It is well known for developing the Unigine Engine proprietary cross-platform middleware. The company also has a game development team...

 announced a competition to support Linux game

Linux gaming

Linux gaming refers to playing or developing video games for the Linux operating systems.- Background :Linux gaming refers to all game titles that can run on Linux based operating systems. This can refer to free / open source games, which may also be commercial, that run natively on Linux, or...

 development. They agreed to give away a free license of their Unigine

Unigine

Unigine Engine is a proprietary cross-platform computer graphics middleware, developed by Unigine Corp. It is used as either a game engine or as an engine for virtual reality systems, serious games and visualization. The most popular Unigine-powered product is .The strongest feature of Unigine is...

engine to anyone willing to develop and release a game with a Linux native client, although they would also grant the team a Windows license. The competition ran until December 10, 2010, with a considerable amount of entries being submitted. Due to the unexpected response, Unigine decided to extend the offer to the three best applicants, with each getting full Unigine licenses. The winners were announced on December 13, 2010, with Kot-In-Action Creative Artel being one of the developers selected.