Author: Stu Horvath

Thank You

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I don’t know if you heard, but we’ve been working on this Kickstarter thing and it got funded yesterday afternoon. We are currently celebrating, sleeping and celebrating sleep – something we’ve not had a lot of recently – but we will be back next week with the great stories you’ve come to expect. I formally thanked the Internet on Wednesday when we raised our goal, and I reprinted it yesterday when the campaign closed. That stands as a good representation of how I feel about the Kickstarter and its success, but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank some

Jostle Bastard: Memory Lane

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It is easy to forget that games don’t spring forth fully formed, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. That isn’t true, though. Games, unlike most other mediums, are constantly changing, like a snake perpetually shedding its skin. Every version is called a build. There are thousands of builds for Jostle Bastard. In terms of scale, it isn’t a game on par with Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption, and yet, there are thousands of iterations that chart its evolution from inception to completion. Every meaningful change to the game spawns a new build. Some seem hardly changed, others are hardly

Jostle Bastard Developer’s Notebook

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One of the most interesting things about the creative process is the artifacts is leaves behind. I’m not talking about the art itself – the value of that is intrinsic. I mean the physical byproducts of process. Painters make sketches. Sculptors build maquettes, filmmakers leave behind elaborate sets. With videogames dwelling almost entirely in the digital realm of builds and iterations, what remnants mark the progress of their designers? For Pippin Barr, it is the scribbles and doodles in an unruled reporter’s notebook that mark the birth and refinement of Jostle Bastard. Play Jostle Bastard.  Then dig into earlier builds

The Jostle Diaries

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Towards the end of the development of Jostle Bastard, I received an email from Pippin Barr that said: Have also pulled out all my diary entries on the subject [of Jostle Bastard], which I’m attaching. They sound a bit disjointed because they’re pulled from my actual diary, which of course includes a bunch of stuff unrelated to this game! The attached document was a kind of poem of doubt that oscillates between the heights of triumph and the depths of despair. After reading through it, I replied: The diary is great stuff. It kind of reads like Dracula or a