Why you should care about our little game

Good a time as any to start our devblog content here with an announcement of the content update for our first release as a studio, Shade Hunters.

Shade Hunters actually dropped on Steam in March and on Google Play in February. We spent the next few months patching and tweaking in response to feedback.

In June, we dropped a major content update with new characters, maps, puzzles, story branches, cutscenes, a crafting system, and quite a few story additions, as well as the requisite amount of bug fixes. We’re hoping you’ll check it out.

Especially since we’re hoping it will be the start of a much longer and more fascinating journey.

Confronted with the aftermath of ambition and science run amok, your player navigates the unknowable beyond.

Why should you care?

Sure, Shade Hunters and Heedless, our open-world RPG for Android, are modest RPGMaker products.

We could sit here and say we put great intentionality and love into them, and we did.

We could say that we spent a lot of time on little details, even if it meant taking a little longer to implement and test, and we did.

We could say that there’s a lot of pathos, humor, suspense, heart, sarcasm, and plot twists in our story, and there are.

We could say that certain moments have been crafted with asset usage never seen in RPGMaker, and they have been.

We could say that we’ve jampacked so much content into it that you could die and restart twenty times and you’d be nowhere close to finding everything that’s in there, and we have.

We could say that we like the idea of proving (perhaps for the sake of the RPGMaker community) that games like this needn’t be hampered by their simple nature, and indeed top-down pixel RPGs make the “top indie games” lists every year.

It’s still “just” a top-down 2D role-playing game.

But it’s also the first step in what could become much bigger dreams than RPGMaker titles. We have desires to turn our tiny corner of the video game industry into a refuge for creatives.

Our gamer readers have probably seen the layoffs in the tech industry over the last couple of years. Between post-COVID reshufflings and the shift of venture capital towards AI, game devs - those on the art side in particular - have been nerfed. Heartrending stories of overwork, underpay, abuse, and harassment have further poisoned the well. There’s a market for gamemakers out in the wind seeking stable, fair, and open-minded work environments in which ideas, not short-term profit projections, grow to dominate the foliage.

Nathan and I are looking to build that kind of operation. We have an additional advantage: living in an affordable area. Thanks to lower cost of living, we can devote time and financial freedom to our projects that might not be possible in other locales. We’re content with simply a decent living if it means having the headroom to put people, ideas, and quality first.

Conventional wisdom

A string of high-profile crowdfunding failures in the video game industry in the last 10-15 years has given rise to some conventional wisdom for indie game devs: start small.

Things get grim for our heroes. 

Both tech veterans and rookies alike have been tripped up by the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon: “How hard can it be?” Well, it can be really hard. Software is notorious for its various subdisciplines not translating well to each other., and that’s before the artistic demands of games. Crowdfunded projects promising soaring, groundbreaking, infinitely complex games launch upon the financial backs of ordinary gamers and, with zero industry experience or revenue stream, get delayed by years or never drop at all. Even when they do release, it might not look any better than that high school fall project that one guy once put together.

Older and wiser, indie game devs can now say that “start small” is the way. Get a financial base under you. Have some games under your belt. Learn the lessons. Do things the hard way. Earn your knowledge.

It’s in that spirit that we’ve launched Shade Hunters and, believe me, even with a small game, we’ve learned. I’ll be sharing more later. But with success for this game, we can push forward towards more ambitious projects.

So - what are those goals?

The future

Did I mention Nathan is an author? The historical fantasy novel Breath of Bones, coauthored by Nathan, will be serving as a springboard for one of our future projects. Set during World War II in 1942 Czechoslovakia, our exciting 2.5D shooter novella will tell stories of the Czech resistance against Germany, with the added twist of a powerful supernatural guardian of Bohemian legend rising again after three centuries to protect the innocent from the Nazi scourge. I have to tell you, there are projects that are perfunctory and there are projects that you can’t help repeatedly coming back to mentally because of the creative possibilities; this novella is the latter for me.

The denizens of Shade Hunters wend their way amongst the rewards and mysteries of the fallen Hollows facility.

In the meantime, we’re also hard at work on a 2D puzzle platformer, a mobile game, another RPGMaker title, and, eventually, an MMO - one with truly unique gameplay mechanics and a meta twist that will allow us to do things we’ve never seen done in the genre.

But that’s a long ways down the road. We’ll need good friends and supporters to get that far.

So now you know why we’re so excited about our humble little roguelite sci-fi mystery RPGMaker game, Shade Hunters. It was a labor of love, but it’s also a financial springboard to exciting possibilities - and a learning tool for greater challenges. We plan to steward whatever rewards we reap in service of building a studio that does game development right.

We hope you’ll consider jumping on board.

Tune in next week for more devblog content.