Packing the First Four Bells
Our first public demo is deliberately small. The difficult part is making small contain enough choices, builds, exploration and bad decisions to make somebody immediately want another run.
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DEVELOPMENT NOTES.
INCIDENTS. LESSONS.
Game development, design decisions, balance experiments and occasional evidence that making the shovel heavier was the correct administrative response.
We Killed the Gravedigger 10,000 Times So You Don't Have To
We spent years working with data and machine learning. It turns out some of that knowledge is surprisingly useful when you need to decide whether a shovel should do 31 damage or 34.
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Building Combat Around a Shovel
Why the Gravedigger starts with simple manual attacks and can end a run as a chain-reaction machine without surrendering player agency.
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Why Every Bell Has to Change the World
The central design rule behind Until the Bells Stop: if a bell rings and the player only sees a bigger number, the bell has failed.
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We Were Supposed to Have Grown Out of This
How Bad Omen Bureau began with Commodore 64 experiments, continued through the 386 and Pentium years, survived several decades of proper employment, and eventually became a game studio.
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