Welcome to the back room

The front of this site is the taproom: finished games, polished and poured, each with a badge that takes you straight to the store. That’s exactly what it should be. It’s also a heavily edited picture of what actually goes on here.

The truth is that for every game that makes it onto the taps, I prototype something like five others that never leave the bench. The taproom has no room for those — a game page without a store badge is a broken promise — so until now they simply vanished, along with everything building them taught me. The same goes for the machinery inside the shipped games: the puzzle generators, the ship navigation, the tuning that took forty tries. The parts I’m proudest of are exactly the parts a store screenshot can’t show.

The Lab is where that work finally gets to exist in public.

What comes out of the tank

Every piece here is a batch: numbered in the order it’s poured, dated, and brewed to stand on its own. Some batches will be making-of pieces about the shipped games. Some will be experiments that never became products but are worth showing anyway. Some will cover the open source projects the studio maintains, some will be notes from whatever is currently on the bench, and a few — like this one — are just me talking.

What you won’t find here is a schedule. The Lab is a collection, not a stream: a batch doesn’t care how long after the previous one it arrived, and each one is meant to read as true in five years as the day it shipped. Come by whenever.

Why write any of it down

Partly for the record — those five-out-of-six prototypes deserve better than oblivion. But mostly because I don’t really understand a thing until I write about it. Solo development means there’s nobody at the next desk to explain your own design decisions back to you; writing them up is the closest substitute I’ve found, and every so often the write-up finds the flaw the prototype was hiding.

And partly, honestly, because this is the fun part. The whole pitch of this studio is that games made by one dedicated person have more character and soul than mass-produced ones. The back room is where the character comes from, and I like showing it off.

There are no comments here — this site has no moving parts, and I like it that way. But if a batch gives you something to say, I’d genuinely love to hear it: write to contact@omgbrews.com or find me on GitHub.