On September 8, 2022, I decided I was going to do something related to games and the game industry.

At the time, I was not sure exactly what the direction would be. Initially, I was thinking I might focus on studying for software engineer interviews, because that is was I was doing at the time.

Little did I know that 3 months later, I would join a community led by Arlan Hamilton, which would provide me insights and send me in a new direction — a direction I have been looking to head in for quite some time.

I have a ton to say about the community and a 15 minute 1:1 chat I had with Arlan, but that will need to be for another post.

What I will say is that as of today, this post and thanks to Arlan, I am more clear than I have ever been on the direction of where I am headed and what I will be focused on for the future.

I am starting a game studio, which will have a community aspect built into it and I will be designing and developing narrative-based games.

The initial iteration of the website can been seen at reeldeveloper.com and the developer logs can be read at blog.daphnelink.com.

There is not much to see yet, but what do people say these days? If you are not embarrassed of the first version of your website, product, service, etc. then you shipped too late. — something like that.

I have the newsletter integrated into the devlogs page, but I need to figure out where to place another link to the newsletter or devlogs page on the studio website.

Next things I need to figure out is which platform I want to use for building a community and also good for courses. I am currently trying to decide between Discord, Discourse, Mighty Networks and Slack.

Once I have these “admin” and setup pieces out of the way, I’ll start working on the first game.

I am excited for this journey and what will transpire.

I have not decided how often I will post a devlog, but every week I will send out a summary of what I worked on to move the game studio forward.

Those weekly summaries will be sent on Sunday’s and only to subscribers. So, if you don’t want to miss the action, head over to the homepage and subscribe to the newsletter: https://blog.daphnelink.com/

Thanks for reading.