Hello friends!

So, to get straight to the point, I have a mailing list, and I would love to use it to tell you about the stuff I'm working on in the future.

You can sign up for it here! 

No weird ads, no spam, and unsubscribe whenever you want.

Now to elaborate in painful detail, if you're interested in why!

It's a really weird time to be a game developer! I'm sure you know about all the layoffs and stuff happening at studios the world over. Where I come from, Melbourne Australia, a lot of wonderful and iconic indie studios have effectively closed their doors, from Samurai Punk to League of Geeks. Jobs are hard to come by, and money is even harder. Publishers are sucking the slime out of the veins of the like, two people they even fund per year at the moment.

At the same time, navigating social media and "marketing" has been a nightmare for a while. Opaque algorithms that change on a dime, invisible metrics determining if your posts are even allowed to be shown to people who already follow you, and yknow, the expectation that you do it all constantly.

I've spent a good amount of time on both these wavelengths, looking for work, trying to get funding for projects, and trying to get anything in front of people's faces through social media. Twitter has never been a good place for promo, but holy crap, absolutely nothing I say is seen by more than 5 of the people who follow me, all of which are irl friends! Yikes!

So, with all of this in mind, what does "work"?

I dunno!!!!

What I can say, though, is I know what makes my soul sick. It's all the shit I just listed off. The stuff that makes me happy is seeing comments from you lot on my game pages, getting into little chats, seeing the videos and streams you make, and engaging in my local community here in Melbourne. I help run a gallery of interactive art and games over here, and it makes it so obvious how special a personal connection is in comparison to basically any number of abstract likes.

So, with that in mind, I'd like to refocus my efforts on making what I want, with no expectations of a certain return, and speaking directly to the people who think that is cool.

I've got a weird and big project in very early stages. I'm playing old JRPGs and platformers, reading books about what old white men thought venus would be, flipping through field guides to plants, and making rope simulations. Linda^3, Death Stranding, Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World, Stalker, Dune. What do these things have in common? If you're reading this, I think you're cool enough to want to find out! And I really do appreciate that. More than you can know. At the end of the day, all I want to do is make cool art, and if I'm lucky, one day it'll pay for food as well, but even if I'm starving, you can't keep me away from the keyboard.

Love you all, and I'll see you in the inbox,

Siobhan <3

PS: I'd recommend you check out my beloved Zachariah's Nth Dimensional Hiking, and her recent update post which goes through a lot of the same sentiments I'm sharing here. We're in this together!