I read a lot of books this year. Probably more than any year of my life? I was really sick and also really home bound.

We also got our library cards working with the Kobo sync which meant I had a constant inflow of new books for free. Honestly, feels fake, I have never read so many library books, not even when I worked at a library, what a deal.

Downside to reading a lot of whatever would be at the library is that a lot of it was pretty mid. While I read 50 books it was actually pretty easy to choose my top 3 because there wasn’t many contenders. Not sure if I’m getting more picky or that I’ve just read some really good stuff over the years and now have a really high bar.

I suspect I’ll still read a few more books this year but I think I’ll just include anything after I push this as a next year contender.

I felt like 2025 started really strong on games. But it took a big dip when we started making games more seriously. I got through a few things in my backlog like Citizen Sleeper and Pentiment. Then Blue Prince happened… and I didn’t really play anything else until the Switch 2 came out. That game just really took over our household upon release, which hasn’t happened since Shadow of the Erdtree.

Blue Prince​

This game is just very good. I don’t want to elaborate too much because it is one of those games where it feels great to make every discovery on your own. I went into it knowing basically nothing about it, just that the boys on The Besties really loved it and the early reviews were full of praise.

Looking back at my final art blog post in 2024 I want to laugh. Not at what I was wrapping up, but where I laid out the goals for my art practice of 2025.

I acknowledged that we were going to start 2025 with a game jam and that would be my art for January. But little did I know that that game jam would completely change the direction the year would take.

January​

January was full focus on Love in the Time of Spellphage. There were characters, there were backgrounds, there were random other assets needed to just add a little more flare. I covered most of these in my DevLog posts last year.

The Steam capsule art for Fatemender has taken multiple months, feedback from many people, and the efforts of both me and my wife. It’s probably good that I was too busy to blog about it earlier in the year as it’s changed a lot since the first version. So this blog post is about trying to summarize that journey.

Version 1​

There’s a lot you want to achieve with your Steam capsule header. You want to get people’s attention, you want to be interesting enough to get people to click, and you want to communicate the important parts of your game that convey genre.

The end of the year is approaching which means it’s time for annual re-cap and review posts! First up is conference talks. We attended 3 of them this year, which probably resulted in listening to around 50 talks. It was a lot of information to take in.

This blog post is going to be biased towards ThinkyCon as it was the most recent conference and likely the one that had the largest influence on Fatemender design decisions so far. The rest are going to be the few talks that were able to stick with me across multiple months.

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post so I thought I’d do a quick little summary one to re-cap some of the bigger things we’ve been up to as a studio. Summer is often a busy time so we’ll likely shift our gears as we get into fall and fight the urge to hibernate for the next few months.

Grants​

We did 2 big grant applications over the summer. The first was for WINGS Elevate, a grant focused on women led development teams. The second was for Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant which focused on traditionally underrepresented groups. These due dates were exactly a month apart which worked out nicely for us to be able to use our demo for both applications.

A few weeks ago I posted about the values we want to live and work by for our studio. That first post focused a lot on Awareness: knowing who we are in the world and the effects of our actions and choices.

We've already made some more strides in our goal of using less big American tech by switching from GitHub to Forgejo!

But today I wanted to talk about our core value: sustainability.

This blog post is a bit of a sequel to A beginners journey through indie marketing. In that post I talked about what I'd learned about how to market indie games as well as the small amount of marketing we did for our first two games.

Today I'll share the exciting results of our first Steam Festival; Debut Fest.

We've been making steady progress on Fateweaver these last few weeks. Hit a big milestone of implementing every single rule we had in paper into the digital version; Parity Milestone!

With the rules and functionality in place we're now moving on to more graphics, sound design, and bug hunting. We have only 2 weeks until one of our grant application deadlines so it's all hands (4) on deck for this last push.

But before getting into Fateweaver updates I wanted to share a game design exercise that helped us identify a problem with our core set up; Tier List your X.

We've been hard at work on the Fateweaver prototype as a funding opportunity looms ahead of us in August.

Sophie's been implementing the ruleset we came up with months ago while adding animation and design in Godot. I've been creating the main art assets that we'll need to make the game playable but also have some of it's final style. I'm happy I spent so much time trying out different styles because it gave me time to really get better at the one we went with, woodcuts.

With a few social plans cancelled for the weekend, I was able to get my last remaining cards done this weekend and declare version one of the Fate Cards ready to go.