Hello!

		
			        I’m Blake Rebeck, one of the lovely souls at Hidden Pizza working on Spook House, and I am here to kick off what will end up being a slew of content in the coming weeks.
		
	

First off we’re going to be posting on this blog weekly with all sorts of design, art, production, and other miscellaneous musings that we can come up with from each team member in the project.
We’re hoping to give you all a glimpse into our development process through filmed Spook House developer interviews. In these we will more specifically go over exciting aspects of the game, content we’ve been testing, or honestly whatever thing excites us in particular on that day.
All of our production pipelines are in full swing so we will have a ton of sneak-peaks, such as concept art and sprites, that we will show you all through our Twitter account.
Lastly, you should certainly expect our store-page at Itch.io and this website to get updated as well.
Additionally, a ton of new people have joined on with us to work on Spook House from marketing, programing, to production. Our new project manager and programmer in particular you will be hearing from so get hyped and stay tuned!

As for kicking off this weekly blog post series, I figured I’d talk a bit about post-IGF. For any of you that don’t know, IGF stands for the Independent Game Festival, occurs concurrently with the Game Developer Conference, and is a competition for every game from AAA to independent student project. In the months leading up to it we began entering an extended phase of “crunch” working on the Spook House.

Crunch in and of itself isn’t inherently a bad process to occasionally go through (and trust me when, with improper management, is it almost entirely unavoidable) but combine this with external factors such as college classes and you end up with a recipe of killing all productivity and motivation after that period of crunch is over. This is exactly what happened to our development in the month immediately after submitting to IGF. What we found is that, after a 2 month long crunch, we were entirely unproductive for 2 weeks and mostly unproductive for 2 weeks after that. While we were extremely productive during crunch, without the proper methodologies and processes being abided by during it, what you gain from doing so can be entirely not worth the cost.

And that’s all I have for this week. Be sure to check back here and follow us on Twitter to keep up-to-date with us. We’re excited to show you what’s in store and to share with you some indie-dev experiences!