After seven years with Ubisoft, George Greer was shocked to learn of the layoffs that left him and 70 others out of a job when the multinational video game corporation shut down its Halifax branch in January 2026.
Not even a full year later, and Greer has launched his new independent studio, besszong, and is in the midst of developing the company’s first project: a comedic multiplayer camping game called Out of Office!
“When we first had the layoffs, one way of coping a core group of us had was to jump into multiplayer games and just kind of disconnect from the bad news,” says Greer, the studio’s founder and creative lead.
“We were playing those games and getting inspiration, all along thinking to ourselves, like, this is not a huge barrier. We could be making one of these games.”
Out of Office! is an entry in the category of emerging games that focus on co-operative play in a sandbox-like environment, often with methods of both helping your friends and swiftly eliminating those relationships with the push of a button.
The game finds you and your friends on a corporate retreat, instructed to survive in a forest based on Kejimkujik National Park, all for the purpose of strengthening your working relationship with your colleagues.
The game’s trailer gets the idea across: you can chose to help your pals with the given objective (such as navigating the world with a broken VR headset courtesy of the fictional company), or you could push them off of a walkway into a river—or better yet, a bear that’s chasing you both.
“We were just laid off from this major corporation, so like, why not take inspiration from that?” says Greer. “There’s a whole firing mechanic where if your energy bar drops too low, then you get fired (instead of killed), and then there’s a rehiring mini-game, so can contact HR and get your friend re-hired.
“We tried to take the worst of corporate culture, which is like, team-building events and ice-breaker stuff, and instead used that to make a fun, humorous game.”
One aspect of these types of video games is an in-game proximity chat, a feature that allows players to hear each other speak in-game with volume levels and audio-panning influenced by how near or far you are from other players. If your friend is standing right next to you, on your left, you’ll likely hear them best through your left earphone/speaker. If they are far away and behind you, there’s a chance you might catch an echo of their voice, but it won’t be all too clear.
Greer says his team took inspiration from several games in the genre to figure out how they wanted the proximity chat in Out of Office! to function.
“We did this analysis when we were developing it,” Greer explains. “What is the best features of proximity chat that we’ve played in games? Of course, PEAK has the one where there’s a doppler effect. As you kind of fly off in the distance, you get this weird pitching up and down, and then there’s also like, someone gets further away, their voice gets muted and echo-ey.”
Another chat feature they adapted is one where if you are underwater, your voice will become modulated and the pitch will be lowered. They’ve also experimented with pitch-shifting voices to be higher in the game—mainly for players turns into raccoons.
“The voice chat is super important to us,” says Greer. “We’re exploring how other companies have made use of it and also how we can make innovations to this technology.”
Throes of development
As of writing, besszong has a consistent team of nine people working on the game; some former Ubisoft staff, others from the Nova Scotia Community College dev program. As Greer puts it, they are currently in the “throes of development,” with internal playtesting having just begun.
“The release is kind of touch-and-go,” says Greer when asked about a potential release date. “We’re aiming for next spring or summer, so like, the maximum we would want to go is about a year from now for an early access release.”
An early access release gives the developer a chance to make improvements on the game as players get to try it out, leaving room for both improvements and new content in the future. It’s a model being used by several independent studios, especially within the friend-core genre.
For besszong, that would include the potential for new levels, based off other national parks within Atlantic Canada.
“We can have a level of actual real world representation while also keeping it kind of super fun,” says Greer.
In a couple weeks, Greer will travel alongside a Canadian delegation of developers to attend Gamescon, a massive, annual industry-focused video game event in Cologne, Germany. As the head of a brand new studio, Greer has a few goals in mind for his trip.
“We’re going with the intent to meet with publishers, but also just kind of networking with the entire games market,” he says.
Even if he’s going on a trip outside the country in part to promote Out of Office!, Greer’s intentions are to keep the themes of the game hyper-local, a celebration of Atlantic Canada’s environment. So far, the game has been met with support from the local dev community.
“The local scene has been huge,” says Greer. “When we first got laid off, I really leaned into that as a support group, so seeing what other people were up to in the province was really important to me, to make sure that this industry wasn’t about to die with the closure of like, the one major studio.
“Announcing that we were forming an independent studio, it was like, they were super engaged and super supportive,” he continues. “Immediately, the like, I don’t know what to call it, the recognition, the support, the celebration of us… it was just so profound and so appreciated.”
If you’re interested in Out of Office!, wishlist it on Steam to receive updates, and be sure to follow besszong on social media.
Will the staff be unionizing?