Past, Present, and Future (a.k.a Roadmap '25)

It’s time for our yearly roadmap post. The previous year was tumultuous, for both the gamedev industry and us with the launch of Hellcard 1.0, technology changes, and team shuffling. We are now well posed for a productive 2025, so let’s talk about Thing Trunk Past, Present, and Future.

The Past

Hellcard

The biggest externally visible event of the past year was the launch of Hellcard 1.0 and Bruja DLC. Both performed well, which wasn’t a given. We launched during a period of many, many failed launches of good games that went under without even making a ripple. After all, in 2024 a whooping 18996 games were released on Steam. That's over 2 games per hour!

Yet we hit over 2000 concurrent players, making it our biggest launch yet! And then soared to over 5600 concurrent players for the Bruja DLC launch.

We are now crunching numbers to see if making DLCs is a valid strategy moving forward. Adding one more class to Hellcard would be awesome, but with our limited manpower, we wouldn’t want to delay other projects unnecessarily.

We also have been polishing and balancing Hellcard, with more cards and complete rework on the Tinkerer class. As a result, we have recently hit an Overwhelmingly Positive rating in recent reviews, which we are super stoked about.

We have also been working on console ports; you can expect more news in that department shortly. The workload was shared between us and an external porting company, which allowed us to learn a lot. In the future, we are going to develop games for consoles and PC at the same time. This should save a lot of time since the work won’t have to be duplicated. It will also make the codebase tidy and organized.

Team Growth and Streamlining

On the team front, there have been changes as well. We took in three interns last year and offered each of them to keep working with us once their internships ended. We are 14 people strong now.

Sadly, Matt, one of the founding fathers, decided to take a more passive role in development, mostly due to burnout. He remains in an advisory role but doesn’t work on any specific project, for now.

Last, but super far from least, after 10 years, we managed to compartmentalize the development. Until now, each one of us has worked on all current projects. We had issues with delegation - team members would consult everyone else about most decisions. While this approach was great for what we call visibility, meaning everyone knew everything going on, it’s detrimental to efficiency. And it put unnecessary strain on the team.

For the last three years, we have been trying to isolate the bureaucracy of running the company and ongoing projects from each other. And on the project scale, learn how to delegate. We are now confident this new system is working.

The Present

First of all, we signed an unannounced project with a publisher. It will be our first UE5 project. That’s all I can say at the moment, though ːarchduckː It will be part of the series and Supporter's Pack, of course.

Book of Aliens

We are looking for funding to expand the Book of Aliens team. The environment is adversarial, to say the least with studios firing devs en masse and investors scared. We have a couple of options that we will continue to pursue while continuing to work on the game. The core Book of Aliens team is small now, we