How Nathan and I started off

The light from the setting sun pulsed between clouds as we snaked down the burdened freeway towards our target restaurant.

It had been thirteen years since we’d seen each other. I'd actually been his group leader at church at the time, and I'd been struck by his balance of informed goofiness and quiet wisdom even then. Then his family moved away.

A much different world later, I'd been looking for a change of scenery and found several of my friends, including Nathan's family, all seemed to have congregated in the same area: Little Rock, Arkansas. I did my research, found the area fit my personal criteria (not to mention beating the pants off the rest of the country in terms of cost of living), and figured what the heck. There were problems with the U-Haul (not their fault), but otherwise the move was seamless, and one of my first orders of business was to reconnect with Nathan and his family, in service of which we were now headed to his favorite Mexican restaurant.

I casually mentioned that, with game development tools becoming more accessible, I'd been thinking about getting into making my own games.

"Oh, I've made a video game," Nathan dropped nonchalantly.

Double take as I sat in the passenger seat.

"Really?" I replied. "You...you want to come work for me?"

Not only had Nathan already released Heedless, an open-world RPG created in RPGMaker, but he was already half finished with Shade Hunters, a dungeon crawler that he had shelved after the pandemic and never fleshed out. The foundation was there - combat, maps, most of the story. Of all coincidences, we had chosen to invest our spare time into a mutual hobby.

I bought both games and hired him, and we got to work adding content, lore, variety, and personality to Shade Hunters.

And that is how we got into this. Quite the wild ride, going from someone I had no reason to think I'd ever see again, to hiring him in just three months' time. Since then, it's been a lot of fun conversations and dreaming of possibilities. Nathan’s games have proven to be solid, enjoyable efforts (for a rookie) and I've come to trust his judgment and work ethic without question.

Crazy how life works out!