All of the things we’ve had to keep under wraps have finally been unveiled to the public, so we thought it’d be a great opportunity to catch folks up on the workings of our studio for the past couple of years!
A “State of the Studio” sounded too grim, so we’re calling it a State of the Union instead, which still works, because we’re just the two of us, and are married and spend all of our time making our games anyways.
Some TL;DR if you don’t want to read a 4,000 word essay on running an indie studio (though you shouuuuuld)
- We wrapped our full time work on Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut about a month ago, meaning we’ve been back at it for Scarlet Hollow for a little while now, but also juggling that with unpacking at a new place and planning an actual wedding to make up for the one we had to do in our tiny apartment for covid reasons!
- Prior to Slay the Princess being announced, Scarlet Hollow’s funding was in a precarious spot, but we’re now able to comfortably self-fund the entire rest of the game without any outside support, meaning we get to stick to our original vision without publisher interference and without running the risk of having funding pulled. (Hello 2020s-era video game industry, so happy we’re not in the middle of you!)
(Note: this part is a huge deal it’s so ridiculously hard to make money doing games. It’s an extremely all or nothing space!) - Episode 5 remains enormous — I mathed it out and had we not done Slay the Princess and somehow managed to still have enough money to eat, we MAYBE would have finished it right about now.
- We’ll be getting out the first alpha builds for Episode 5 to testers later this year, probably mid-fall.
- Episode 5 will come out some time in 2025, but we don’t want to pin down any specifics until we’re confident about our timing.
Thank you all so much for your patience and support, it means the world to us!
itsmewahoo
