Starting a development blog

Who are we#

Firstly, I should introduce myself: my name is Matheus and I am the tech director of Game Smithing.

Game Smithing is a small independent studio (currently 10 people) working on console & PC titles, focusing on systemic gameplay. Our first title was Soulstone Survivors, which launched in November 2022 and went on to sell over 1.3 million copies across all platforms.

We are currently in full production on Veil of the Soulstones, as well as continually working on Soulstone Survivors and doing pre-production on Rogue Soulstone.

Although Soulstone Survivors was our first official game as a studio, a lot of us have known each other and worked together one way or another for over 10 years. Allan (studio owner and director), Fernando (3D artist), Alex (2D and VFX artist), Gama (audio director) and I all worked together in the mid-2010s at indie studio, which at the time was based in Allan's mom's garage.

I'm hoping that over time you'll get to hear from each team member about the interesting things they get to do every day.

Why start a development blog#

Soulstone Survivors was initially released as an Early Access game. We've released over a dozen updates leading up to our 1.0 release. Developing an Early Access game and updating it every 6-8 weeks kept us very close to our community over Discord and Steam forums, as we worked together to build the game to what it is today.

However, we've spent the last many months working on Veils, figuring out what makes it special, finding the fun, trying to narrow in on the core of the game, what the game wants to be. Since Veil is such a unique game, this process has taken longer than we expected, and as a consequence we've been radio silent for a while.

I'm hoping this blog is one of the ways we'll rectify that. The idea is to post regular updates -- I'm hoping weekly or biweekly -- on all aspects of the development of not only Veils, but all of our games.

A personal hope of mine is that, by sharing the little we do know, we can help other developers so that they don't have to make the same mistakes we've made. I'm also hoping that by posting stuff here, people might email us to say "hey, about that thing you are doing... are you nuts?", and save us from a lot of pain and suffering :slightlysmilingface:

What to do now#

Our first actual post should be up now. It's the first in a series of posts about the networking architecture of Veil of the Soulstones. You can read it here.

Feel free to shoot me an email, join our Discord or our mailing list for updates about our games.

Thanks and have a good one.