Partnering Up!

I've known Will for about 15 years. The dude is a delightful person. Of equal importance he is a fantastic designer and 50x the engineer I will ever be. So, it is with great joy that I announce the arrival of Will Holland, my new partner at Go On Entertainment!

We might need a Gleek at some point.

Will and I have always had a running conversation about games and design. We get in the weeds in a good way. From Dwarf Fortress, to MtG, to D&D, to 40k, we both love to really analyze and riff on what makes games good. We both REALLY love to ship games.

We don't always agree, and thankfully so. We check each other all the time. No one needs an echo chamber, especially in game development. Often when we do agree it is for very different reasons and from very different angles. When we disagree, we do so without ego. We don't let the other person win out of exhaustion. We focus on the problem we are solving and we grind it out until there is a solution we are happy with. We don't bicker.

What does this mean for CRUFT and Go On?

Well, in short, more and faster. Truth be told though, also better. More focused effort on better code. More riffing on design and development options to get to better solutions. Better days for me because being alone is not that much fun for me. Better for you, because better games.

You are, however, still stuck with my art =)

I think the most important thing that scooping up Will does for Go On is add some layer of consistency. In the words of Ice Cube, "You better check yourself before you wreck yourself." My man.

Sometimes you just need someone else to either validate or shoot down something you are working on to keep things popping. Sometimes you need someone else to solve a problem their way so that your ideas don't turn into some middle-ages, incestuous, noble, family tree. Vetting things in real time, all the time, means more consistent outcomes.

I don't know it yet, but Will is going to smoke my big, awesome, model in the foreground on turn two. What a jerk.

This partnership also just means more fun. While we're going to keep our ambitions reasonable, there's just a ton more we can do now as a team than was possible before. The prospect of having some off-sites out in the barn rolling some dice is a nice fringe benefit, not to be overlooked.

We'll do it LIVE!

Well sort of. Now that there are two of us it might be fun to take folks along for the ride as we sort out this indie studio thing. We're tentatively going to be streaming some meetings on Monday and Thursday afternoons on Twitch here and the YouTubes here. Give us a follow if you are morbidly curious as to what the day-to-day life of indie development looks like.

I've buried this a little on purpose. We've got some A/V stuff and scheduling to lock in as so this info is really for the hardcore folks that can read all the way to the bottom of a three minute blog. A soft-launch if you will. Drop by and say 'hi' and listen to the ramblings of a couple of blokes trying to make a living out of indie dev.

Thanks for reading!