Devlog

Kasino 84 is up. It has blackjack and roulette right now, and both run in the browser.

It's fake money only. No accounts, purchases, payouts, or any of that. Your stats save in your browser.

Wanted both games to be quick and work well on a phone. They're playable now, but I'll keep messing with the controls and layout.

DVD Survivors is out on Steam now for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

It started as a joke about the bouncing DVD logo and got a little out of hand. There are 62+ weapons, 46+ evolutions, 24+ synergies, and more than 100 achievements. Mike B made the soundtrack.

I'm still fixing bugs and tuning things as people play. The patch notes are here.

Every few weeks another indie studio announces their "revolutionary MMO." There's a Kickstarter with a $500K goal and 47 stretch goals, concept art of a vast open world, a roadmap that goes to 2029, and a Discord with 50,000 people waiting for a game that doesn't exist yet. It's one of the weirdest patterns in the industry and it never stops being funny.

So we made an actual MMO. In one day. It's called Null Online.

You're a single pixel in an infinite 3D void. You can move, see nearby players on a proximity radar, and chat. That's the whole game. You cannot fight, trade, quest, or do anything else. The feature list is four items long and one of them is "exist."

Accounts persist, positions save between sessions, and movement and chat sync in real time. The browser build is free and weighs about 2.7 MB.

There is no battle pass, premium currency, or season pass. The optional $3 Supporter Pack turns your pixel and name gold. It has no gameplay effect.

The experiment was whether a shared world still feels inhabited after removing quests, combat, inventory, progression, and the map.

People have already found each other out there in the void, talked for a while, and drifted off. Some just float alone. Both feel right.

Null Online is finished and free to play at nullonline.com.

Submitted both the main Starboys project and the Starboys Playtest to Steam this week. The store page, build, everything - it's all in their review queue now.

Not a ton to say about it honestly. Filled out the forms, uploaded the builds, hit submit. Now it's just waiting. Steam's review process takes however long it takes.

The playtest build is the same alpha we've been running locally, just packaged up properly for Steam's infrastructure. Once it's approved we can start inviting people in through Steam directly instead of sending builds around manually.

We're going to GameOn Expo this year, which means we need an actual booth. Spent the last few weeks buying TVs, figuring out how to transport everything, and making sure we have enough controllers.

The remaining booth work is cable management, signage, controller setup, transport, and keeping the systems cool in the convention hall.

If you're at GameOn, come play Starboys.

Figured the new year was a good time to look back at where Starboys started and where it's at now.

The core of the game is the gravity system - walk on walls, ceilings, flip mid-fight. Getting that to feel right took a while. We went with FishNetworking for multiplayer, rebuilt the player controller more times than we'd like to admit, and eventually landed on something that feels good.

From there: new character model, basic level design, a few game types, and interactables like jump pads, bounce walls, gravity zones. The kind of stuff that makes arena shooters fun to mess around in.

Lots of playtesting - in person, online, yelling at each other, finding bugs. It's been a good way to figure out what works and what doesn't.

The current build is playable. Match tuning, the server browser, and more arenas remain.

Started digging into the narrative side of Bloodrust this week. The visual direction is feeling solid enough that it's time to figure out what actually happens in this world.

The setting has a tone - dark, corroded, heavy - but tone isn't story. Spent a lot of time just writing. Lore documents, character backgrounds, faction motivations. Most of it won't end up in the game directly, but it shapes everything. When you know why a place exists, you design it differently.

The story will live in environments, item descriptions, and incidental dialogue rather than long cutscenes.

Been kicking around an idea for a while and finally started putting real work into it. Bloodrust - dark fantasy action RPG, heavy atmosphere, no hand-holding.

The first work is project structure and art direction: dark environments, heavy texture, deep shadow, and corroded metal.

The current material is concept art and design mockups. There is no playable build yet.

Started prototyping the multiplayer for what's becoming Starboys. The core idea - arena shooter with full gravity manipulation - only works if it's multiplayer, so netcode had to come first, not last.

FishNet handles the networking layer. Two clients can now connect, move, and synchronize in the same space.

Each player can have a different down direction, so orientation has to synchronize with position. The basic two-client test now works without desync.

Next: the player controller.

This is the first entry so might as well explain what's going on. I'm starting a game studio. It's called Signal Spike Games.

The first work was business registration, accounts, hosting, source control, and project management.

Signal Spike Games makes games we want to play. Projects use contractors and collaborators for art, music, maps, testing, and other work as needed.

A few game ideas are already in development.