End of summer studio activities

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.

We have already heard back from WINGS to hear that we didn’t get that one. And seeing the announced titles I can understand why. The winners have very advanced, very polished looking games. It had been promoted as a grant for prototypes but, just as with trying to get a publisher, it seems like the more finished your game is the better chance you have.

Responses for Draknek won’t go out until December so we still have a lot of waiting left for that one. They also received over 300 applicants which is a scary amount of studios to compete with.

QGCon

At the end of September we attended the Queerness in Games Conference (QGCon).

We were selected to take part in the Arcade to show Love in the Time of Spellphage. This was our first time showing a game as the studio anywhere and our first real interactions with the public as a studio. We were quiet nervous about the event, unsure what to expect or even what to prepare for. The whole thing ended up being on the quieter side which meant fewer people to try our game but it gave us lots of time to socialize and get to know the other presenters in the Arcade room which was really cool.

While the event didn’t feel like a great marketing beat for Spellphage or anything like that, getting to meet other queer game devs making weird and unique games made the event feel worthwhile. We also got to meetup with some friends from the Baby Ghost program and catch a few of the talks. We also got to give out Dustin stickers which was fun because a lot of players were won over to being Dustin fans.

Life activities

We had multiple family visits over the summer that we balanced with our grant and event deadlines. My hip pain came and went, getting 2 cortisone shots that seemed to make no difference. So I got a cane to try to take some stress off my body but the only real way to avoid making things worse seems to be to walk as little as possible. Sitting at the conference for two days in a row definitely wasn’t appreciated by my body.

The weekend after QGCon was my wife’s birthday and since we had a pretty stressful summer with no real vacation time we made an indulgence out of it. Booking a cabin with a full Nordic Spa experience just outside of Montreal. With fall just getting started we got extremely lucky with some lovely weather and the trees putting on their fall colours.

The cabin marked the end of our busy summer so now I hope to settle into some home routines for a while, catch up on some cleaning, get back into the Godot course, start the Chris Z marketing course, and put some real focus into some Fateweaver art.

What’s next

Project wise we have a few different things in motion.

We feel like we’ve pushed for as much feedback as we can get from our limited circle at the moment for Fateweaver. We have a Fate expansion in the works which is likely to be the last content expansion before we release a demo on Steam. We have an idea for how we want the final game to be formatted now which means re-building a fair bit of what we currently have. Not in gameplay but in structure.

Something we picked up on in playtesting was that it’s hard to keep everyone happy. Which obviously isn’t something you can do 100% but given this is our first major commercial game we want to aim for the largest audience we can. So while we had a few players pick up on things very quickly and even master the game, we also saw how others struggled with the tutorial. We did want to make a difficult game, which we knew wouldn’t be for everyone, but we do want to at least be able to get most, if not everyone, through the tutorial to get a grasp for the game. So we’re now working on the ramping and speed of how the game begins to hopefully make it a more generalized welcoming experience.

Love in the time of Spellphage has been selected to be included in an upcoming Steam festival which is pretty exciting as it’s still just our 2nd one ever. Spellphage also passed 100 wishlists on Steam a few weeks ago which means we’ll be sticking to our planned Steam release of early next year! 100 wishlists is baby numbers when it comes to Steam but for it to be our first game that we aren’t pushing hard on marketing and that it’s a short narrative game (not popular on Steam), it’s still an exciting number to reach. To give it another shot at some visibility we’ll submit Spellphage to Steam Next Fest in February 2026 and likely release it not long after that.

Conclusion

For specific studio wthcrft news you can now subscribe to a newsletter on our website. I’ll likely be taking parts of these blog posts for newsletter updates as it’s fully studio branded instead of my personal blog. Do still hope to keep blogging though. But I’m also looking to migrate my Docsaurus Markdown blog to a more dynamic setup, just haven’t had the time to really investigate alternatives. Maybe something that supports comments.

My goal for the next few weeks is to wrap up a lot of Fateweaver art but also to hopefully wrap up Hades 2 so that it stops being my main distraction...