Do you like casual games? Do you like hearing about one woman's solo game development after 20+ years of making games at other companies? If so, you're in the right place.
I’m so glad that you answered the call to subscribe to my newsletter. No, sincerely. Over the years I think we’ve all been refining our models for how we want to get information and talk to people who we don’t know well but will support our work, or how we’ll keep up with those whose work we want to support even if we don’t really want to engage with social media.
In that time I’ve ditched email, went all in on social media, and then started ditching social media and picking up email again. I’ve learned that email newsletters from people that write them well and have work I want to follow and support are honestly a treat to get in my inbox. They’re the new blog, I think. I aim to be one of those kinds of newsletters for you, and not too frequently.
The Story of Shadow Dog Games
If you don’t already know who I am, lemme give you the pertinent bits:
I initially planned to be an astrophysicist, but then while I was doing astrophysics in the 90s, Quake got released. It changed my life and my career. I worked in game-adjacent stuff in the 90s and early 2000s, eventually using my weird collection of abilities as a hobby programmer, graphic designer, and web developer to move into UI and UX design in 2004 at Raven Software.
In 2018 I decided to try something different when Meta recruited me to work at Oculus Research on their AR technology. For the next four years I worked on what user experiences would be like on devices we weren’t even thinking would exist for another twenty years. Fascinating, but also big, complex, and ambiguous. (If you’ve read anything about the Orion AR glasses project, that’s what I was working on.)
I loved the work but found myself drifting more and more away from Meta as an organization I wanted to be aligned with, and so in 2022 I left, intending to take a small break and figure out if I wanted to get back to games, which I missed, or put a little more jet fuel in the fine art practice I’d been building up for a few years.
(Did I mention I’m a painter? That’s a whole separate subject — and newsletter — which you can find at carynvainioart.com if that’s your thing.)
Solo game dev was attractive for a few reasons, despite the obvious risks. But the game industry itself had become even more risky than it had always been. When a game startup that I joined after Meta went the way that startups tend to do in May of this year, I decided that now was the time to take the solo development I’d been doing on the side and parlay that into a real thing.
Shadow Dog Games is not a studio seeking investment; it is not a team of people with funding. Shadow Dog Games is just me and my savings and trying something in games that painting has given me: the experience of full creative control and the navigator of my own destiny.
The logo and name
If you’re like me and love graphic design, you might be interested in knowing that the logo design is my own. Logo and branding design are things I actually really love doing and have done it on the side for years.
The name Shadow Dog Games came first — our dog’s name is Shadow, and like all dog owners we have a million nicknames for him, with Shadow Dog being one of them. It made me think of a shadow puppet dog, and I instantly had the logo in my head and the strong desire to use it as a name to release games under, since I wanted to keep my painting work associated with my actual name.
Shadow taking advantage of a sunbeam.
Next time: the story of Wordy Rain
To keep this newsletter from being a novel, I’ll save the story of Wordy Rain, Shadow Dog Games’ first game, for next time. I’ve already got the post-Wordy Rain game deep in the planning stages, and I’m anxious to get to it, but there’s work to do to get Wordy Rain finished and up on the Steam store for an official release.
In the meantime, you can play the latest prototype build at my Itch.io site! I uploaded build 0.7.0, which should have a lot more stuff now for those who’ve tried it before!
Wordy Rain is available for both Windows PC and MaOS.
Do you like casual games? Do you like hearing about one woman's solo game development after 20+ years of making games at other companies? If so, you're in the right place.
