About

We are Ottodork & we are a fine art & narrative game studio based across Istanbul & London, creating brand new art, stories & training programs & consultancy in all aspects of creative production. 

We are currently in production for further fine art collections & our launch anthology of tabletop games, coming in 2024.  

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Making beautiful things, using beautiful tools, creating beautiful spaces. 

Stories & art of indulgent, feverish blood feuds, delightful incompetence, irredeemable villainy — 

and dessert. 

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We have been providing educational programs, mentorships & consultancy in IP development, professional practice, narrative & character development and more - as well as releasing our launch gorgeous collections of fine art by our artist-in-residence Idil Sukan.  

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Idil Sukan

All the art & design you see coming from Ottodork all been created by our artist-in-residence Idil Sukan. She worked as an internationally acclaimed creative director, consultant, photographer, production designer & creative-development educator for many years, and has worked with countless major multinational studios as well as (literally) thousands of indie projects, teams, films, theatres, musicians and comedians.

Idil began her new career as an artist & writer in 2020, and did what she never realised she would ever do - leave London (WHAT) to venture to her fatherlands - the coasts of the mighty Bosphorus in Istanbul - and she has never been happier. She is unearthing her roots, it was the many artistic members of her Turkish family who first inspired her to create art when she was just a tiny ridiculous toddler Idil. She is still short. And ridiculous. But now Idil is developing her own fine art, she is leading the Ottodork team in the development of stories, characters and narrative interactive tabletop games, with an emphasis on collaborative storytelling.

“Sukan’s eye is sharp, witty and utterly original and is surely one to watch for the future” 
- Sotheby’s

Idil is investing her time & leading the Ottodork team in learning new craft techniques and working with new materials, techniques as well as re-discovering the loves & techniques she had when she was a young teen artist, including all manner of printmaking inc. Japanese wood block printing, lino & silkscreen as well Ottoman & Byzantine tile & Illuminated art, sequential comics, Warner Bros (especially the work of Chuck Jones), avant garde, brutalism and much much more. 

“The Sukan style is distinctive, gorgeously lit, intimately composed and atmospheric” 
-The Independent

Her practice itself prioritises teaching. She is classically trained in fine art techniques, Renaissance & Russian constructionist drawing. She has taught a quite mind-boggling range of subjects since she was 14 years old, as vast as Thai Boxing to improvisational comedy, to VFX and absolutely thrives when training new generations of creatives. She founded a unique incubation accelerator mentorship program in IP and narrative professional practice for new & emerging Game Design creatives and has been a guest lecturer and mentor in creative direction and production development at undergrad & Masters level. 

She has developed training programs on a wide variety of subjects including: Narrative design, ideation & storyboarding, commercial practice, motion & anatomy mechanics, gameplay, accessibility & inclusivity and more. With a theatre performance & stand up comedy background, she was mentored herself by Second City and developed a Chicago style improvisation training program in London which hugely informs her incredibly joyful and story-centred development & luminously hilarious, memorable and loved characters. 

She is also hugely influenced by music, is an accomplished lyricist and song-writer in her on right, having performed her own work in London, Edinburgh, New York & Istanbul, as well as collaborating with her sister Julia Sukan, renowned classically & jazz-trained pianist, soundtrack composer & musical director. 

"Soulful" - The Guardian

"The intimate sense of the subjects make Sukan one of the very best"
- The Upcoming

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Making Your Own Marks

We prioritise in-house development & although we're all absolute tech hounds, we understand the critical importance of real-world development, analogue materials, real-life observation.

All our work emerges from real-life specificities and idiosyncracies that we merge together and allow to bake slowly and most ridiculously. We grow up with them, discover them, discover ourselves in the process. It's the most fulfilling & replenishing way to create. We will absolutely bang on to our collaborators and mentees, students: draw, make marks, keep messy, incomprehensible sketchbooks, discover yourself through that gorgeous, impossible chaos. We have lost count of how many sketchbooks there are in our studio. It's so wonderful.  

Deciphering Your Own Marks

We invest in creatives at the ground level, developing education programs for creative production with progressive approaches, centering collaborative and empathetic, experential, sensory & theme-led development, training designers in how to prioritise defining and matching their own intentionality & professional daily practice to audience-experience.

This is critical - we believe in discovery THROUGH practice. We don't judge before creating, that would stop it in its tracks. This also means you discover yourself through practice - it's revelation after revelation of discovering your own values, your own priorities, your own joys. And these revelations create much more robust commercial cores - they become their own fuel of personal development and of industry development. We're not trying to get you to do things the way we do them - we are experts in facilitating the space and the strategy in how to figure out how to do things the ways YOU want to do them. It's really pretty thrilling. 

Mentorship 

We specialise in character development, how to build teams, storytelling, lean production architecture, inter-sensory experiences, accessibility & our own proprietary creative development research in Dynamic Development. 

We provide mentorship, creative development and skills training & consultancy internationally for all creative professionals, especially across the game & animation disciplines across all skill & experience levels. 

We develop in conjunction small scale artisanal manufacturers, workshops, agents of art tools & tech brands to create new work from the ground up, with an emphasis on high quality materials. Too often so much extraordinary artistic work is left to digital ethers - there is nothing - nothing - quite like seeing art that you love in real life, that exists in real physical space - art that you invest in to form part of your environment, your day to day existence, morphs with you, is in conversation with you. To present artwork like this - there is such an important implicit respect and value given to the artist themselves, real life proof of the value we give artists. 

We prefer small-batch manufacturing, individual oversight of each individual product we make. The fine art products we make even if it is the same design is limited edition, collectible, and even if of the same design, they are individually printed so each copy will have its own unique character. The ones you invest in really become your one, no one else will have it quite like yours.  

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Our core team: 

Creative Director, Writer, Artist-in-Residence: Idil Sukan

Operations Director, Manufacturing Localisation, Finance Architecture: Emir Efli

Sound Director, Customer Relations Logistics, Story Development: Julia Sukan 

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Our Satellite Collaborators 

Publisher, Canada Localisation, Engineering & Systems Architecture Consultant, Game Designer & Artist: Pete Davoust

Narrative Designer & Writer, Game Designer, Game Systems: Luke Frostick

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All art & characters: Copyright Idil Sukan 2023
Ottodork Design & Web: Copyright Ottdork 2023