MIX IT! Revolutions — The Real Story Begins
From a 48-hour game jam to a fully realized universe. From Limón to North Macedonia and Mexico and back. This is how MIX IT! became something nobody planned — and everything it was always going to be.
MIX IT! began as a game made in 48 hours for a virtual game jam. What it became — over three expansions, two funding cycles, a world finals, a cinema center milestone, and a team assembled across Costa Rica, Mexico, and North Macedonia — is something nobody fully anticipated at the start. That is what great games do. They reveal their full size over time.
Most game universes are architected from the top down — mythology first, games second, lore as marketing. The MIX IT! universe was built the opposite way: from a 48-hour constraint, through real classrooms, through international competition, through the particular pressure of having to prove your value to institutions that had never funded a game before. The mythology didn't come first. It emerged from the work. That is why it feels earned.
Three phases — how a universe earns itself
Phase 01 · 2022 · AUGE-UCR/SBD · $12K incubation — MIX IT! — The Tutorial. Born in a 48-hour virtual game jam. Taken to the Game Jam Plus World Finals in Rio de Janeiro — Best Game about Color, Best Sound Design. Applied to the AUGE-UCR/SBD state incubation program. Awarded $12,000 for educational content, teacher and student validation across three countries, and publication on Legends of Learning. Result: a 4.3/5 rating and over 5,000 monthly active users. Within the MIX IT! universe, this first edition is exactly what its name implies in the larger story — the tutorial. The Astropilots in training, learning the rules of a cosmos they will soon be called to defend.
Phase 02 · 2023–2024 · AUGE-UCR/SBD · $20K acceleration — MIX IT! Reloaded — The Arcade. A second funding cycle — $20,000 for acceleration — shifting focus from validation to world-building. Art polishing. Character design. Original music. The full construction of the MIX IT! aesthetic universe. And the ASTROPARTY: physical MIX IT! arcade machines bringing the digital world into real spaces across Costa Rica. Within the fiction, Reloaded is the diegetic arcade — the commercial version of the Astropilots' adventures that exists inside the MIX IT! universe itself. The characters playing their own game. A knowing wink that only a studio built on "Science Is Arcade" could pull off.
Phase 03 · 2025–2027 · Fauno Fund · Costa Rican Cinema Center — MIX IT! Revolutions — The Real Story. The first game in history to win the Fauno production fund from the Costa Rican cinema center. Revolutions is where the tutorial ends and the real mission begins. A powerful entity called NOX has taken the chromatic deities hostage — and wants to make the universe monochromatic. To reduce everything to grey equilibrium. To eliminate color, contrast, and the chaos that makes existence worth having. The Astropilots must protect the light, rescue the deities, and defeat NOX. Science is still the mechanic. The Caribbean coast is still the aesthetic DNA. And for the first time, the full weight of what three phases and three years of building have produced is behind it.
The universe — what Revolutions is actually about
In the beginning, the universe was built on color. The chromatic deities — ancient, luminous, irreducible — held the spectrum in dynamic tension. Not the balance of sameness, but the generative contrast between hues that makes light meaningful, vision possible, and existence worth having.
NOX does not want to destroy the universe. NOX wants to perfect it. To reduce it to a single, pure, undifferentiated equilibrium — no color, no contrast, no chaos. Just silence. Just grey. NOX has taken the chromatic deities hostage. With each one captured, the spectrum narrows a little more.
The Astropilots are the protectors of the light. Trained in the science of color — in everything MIX IT! players have been learning since the first edition — they now face the mission the tutorial was always preparing them for. The first game was their training. Reloaded was their playground. Revolutions is the real thing.
Science is still the mechanic. Understanding color, light, and the properties of the spectrum is what makes you better at playing. But now that science carries the weight of an entire universe depending on it.
The team — assembled one game jam at a time
There is a version of team-building where you post a brief and hire the most qualified applicants. And there is a version where you spend five years showing up — at game jams, at world finals, at events — and the team assembles itself from the people who were already in those rooms, already doing the work, already part of the same community you were building inside of. The MIX IT! Revolutions team is entirely the second kind.
Every person on this project was found through the work. That is not a small thing. It means the team shares not just skills but a common understanding of what games can be — and what it takes to build them in Latin America, without the infrastructure that more established markets take for granted.
T3AMPO Core Team (T3AMPO Studio · Limón, Costa Rica) — Studio founders. Studio direction, original IP, sound design, visual identity. The composer and visual artist who built MIX IT! from a 48-hour jam to a cinema center production.
Mariana Navarro (Honey Toast Studio · Costa Rica) — Best Narrative GJP 2022, Best Game of LatAm GJP 2023. Director of MIX IT! Revolutions. Award-winning narrative designer — now leading the creative direction of the most ambitious chapter in the MIX IT! universe.
Isaac & David Vega (Tobeni Studios · Costa Rica) — Best Sound Design GJP 2024, 2nd Best Game in the World GJP 2025. Art and game design. Among the most decorated game developers Costa Rica has ever produced — bringing world-class craft to the Revolutions universe.
Daniela (North Macedonia) — Marketing Director, Smart Start Media. CEO of Smart Start Media. Met at the Game Jam Plus World Finals in Brazil. Leads the campaign strategy for a game that needs to speak to students, educators, gamers, and cultural institutions at once.
Isabel (Mexico) — Producer, Pink Bear Games. CEO of Pink Bear Games. Met at the Game Jam Plus World Finals in Brazil. Brings international production experience and the perspective of a studio founder navigating the global indie market.
The Sound of Limón (Caribbean musicians · Limón, Costa Rica) — Original soundtrack. Prestigious Caribbean artists rooting the cosmic story of the Astropilots in the specific, irreplaceable sound of the Caribbean coast. The universe sounds like where it comes from.
Two members of the Revolutions team — Isabel and Daniela — were met at the Game Jam Plus World Finals in Brazil. The same competition where MIX IT! first proved it deserved to exist also introduced the people who would help build what it becomes next. Some things don't need explaining. They just need to be seen.
Ian Rochlin in Limón
EXPOVIT 2024 · Municipality of Limón. In 2024, Ian Rochlin — founder of Game Jam Plus — traveled to Costa Rica as an international guest speaker for EXPOVIT 2024, the game development event produced and sponsored by T3AMPO Studio.
He went to Limón. Not as a tourist — alongside the T3AMPO team, to sit with the Municipality of Limón and talk about what game development means for the Caribbean province. About what it means that a studio from this city had won international awards at his competition. About what a creative economy built on original IP actually looks like from the inside.
At that point, T3AMPO had raised $32,000 in total funding through the AUGE-UCR/SBD incubation and acceleration cycles — built from original IP, from a game jam, from the conviction that a studio from the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica had something the world didn't have yet.
The man who built the competition where that conviction was first validated was in Limón, making the case alongside them. Make of that what you will.
En números: $32K total recaudado a través de incubación y aceleración AUGE-UCR/SBD · 3 fases (MIX IT!, Reloaded, Revolutions) · 1er juego en ganar el fondo de producción Fauno del centro de cine.
"The first edition was the training. This is the mission."
NOX wants a monochromatic universe. A world without contrast, without color, without the particular creative friction that makes things worth making. T3AMPO Studio — from Limón, from the Caribbean coast, with a team that spans Costa Rica, Mexico, and North Macedonia, funded by institutions that had never funded a game before — is building the counterargument. One pixel, one mechanic, one Astropilot mission at a time.
MIX IT! Revolutions is coming. The real story begins now.n la disciplina para llevarlos hasta el final.
