Busan Student Team SmallBoots Wins Two Rookie Awards for Soom
The interview reveals how the team unified its art direction mid-development and structured its coursework to make a polished student game that drew consistent lines at BIC2026.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
Team SmallBoots, 14 students from Dongseo University in Busan, won Excellence in Art and Excellence in Game Design in the rookie category at BIC2026 for their graduation project Soom. The top-down action adventure draws visual inspiration from Sky: Children of the Light and combat references from the Zelda series and Death's Door.
At BIC2026, the booth for Soom kept a steady line of attendees across two days, prompting 4Gamer to try the game on the final day and speak with its developers. The team, Team SmallBoots, consists of 14 students from the Game Department at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, and Soom is their graduation project.
The action adventure casts the player as Rif, a totem god awakened from a seal, fighting monsters born from human desires. The art takes inspiration from Sky: Children of the Light, while combat, built on attacks and parries, references the Zelda series and the top-down soulslike Death's Door. The team started with 15 members and now has 14, with three main art staff though all members contribute to modeling in some form.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.