Spring 2025 Update

It’s been an extra busy spring for us, so there’s a lot to catch up on here and a lot of incoming WIP to share. In brief: things are good!

We kicked off the year with GDC, which for us is essentially an annual creative retreat, where we catch up with dev friends from all over and talk about the art of making games. It’s challenging and inspiring, and most years, we come away with a new energy for what we do.

Once we got home, we had just over two weeks to finish organizing a local games showcase and get Raincaster ready for its public debut there. I’d been reworking the story/puzzle design and had everything torn apart, so those two weeks were… well, productive.

We also had the late realization that the public demo needed something besides the temp banjo loop we’d been using up to that point. On such short notice, our go-to composers weren’t available, so we took a chance on someone we’d just met briefly at GDC: Michael Kirby Ward—and he did a phenomenal job! It’s always amazing to me how the right music makes a game suddenly 100% more real.

I came home with pages of notes from watching people play, which is gold. Unexpectedly, attendees seemed to be more drawn to Raincaster than the other games, which up to this point had been Burly Men at Sea’s role. I think I needed that validation that my work wasn’t already past its prime, especially coming off our failure with Wooden Nickel.

After that, we expected things to slow down, but instead, I was invited to speak at a local event. I don’t do talks. Ever. But they caught me while I was proud of myself for organizing a successful showcase, and well, I did it!

I spoke about how making games brought storytelling back into my life, and it will never not make me cringe to hear myself, but I’ll put together the video and slides for supporters.

Meanwhile, David has been busy with a little of everything! It turned out to be harder than expected to find a studio willing to let him work remotely, so he’s instead been working as a contractor and consultant on a mix of projects, including Raincaster, while in the early stages of turning a screenplay he wrote into an animated film. Film is really his love, so lately we’ve both had a deep sense of fulfillment in our individual work.

Aside from all that, we’ve been filling any spare moments with outdoor time, as it’s rare for spring weather to last this long here in the Ozarks. The end of this month will mark the one-year anniversary of our tornado, and we’re finishing a couple of last repairs while new growth fills in around us.

We’ve got a lot more posts on the way, if I can keep up: WIP, Behind-the-Scenes, Brawn&Brawn, etc. But mostly, we’re going to keep making this game, so you can play it. 💪