Woke up to the news that Cadence is App of the Day in Australia and New Zealand! 🥲 apps.apple.com/us/story/id1...

Cadence from @thefuntastic.bsky.social is a rewarding puzzler with a music element. It also has a fun sandbox mode that lets you make music! I love the art direction. #Indiegames #puzzle #steam #steamdeck 🎮 Read my review on @thegeeklygrind.bsky.social:

Cadence is 15% off in the Steam spring sale! store.steampowered.com/app/362800/C... Perfect time to grab it if you missed the launch discount! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1tj...

Say you've been working on a game for 13 years without saying you've been working on a game for 13 years...

It's been a bit bizarre and frustrating securing coverage for Cadence, but then you discover that small creator has made an absolute gem of a review and it puts a smile on your face! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1tj...

What's that, just a casual FRONT PAGE OF THE FREAKING APP STORE!!

Cadence was born in the same game jam as Mini Metro. To see it on the same best of list, despite coming out more than a decade apart it's breaking my brain in the best way possible! 🤯

This is wonderful. A chill puzzler that at times feels like wiring up old synths, but in a manner that’s entirely approachable. Perfect fodder for fans of puzzles and/or people who like making chill audio loops. There’s also a built-in construction kit so you can fashion your own levels and melodies

@eddybox.bsky.social I don't think we've ever met at any events, but just wanted to say osmos is probably one of my favourite games from the early days of the app store... Was very influential on me as a baby game dev! Also didn't realise you worked on Gibbon. A++ Execution!!

This is like those EDM songs with Alan Watts talks layered in I reached the end with just a few bonus levels left, mostly through trial and error and intuition. It's not a long game in that sense, and I don't have the mind for the sandbox, but it's serene, uplifting, and beautiful Do check it out

Cadence is out now! Make music by solving circuits. It took 13 years to figure how to do this well! Beyond the puzzles: 🐈‍⬛ Pet Ren, the cat! 📜 Enjoy Ren's life philosophy (all text is skippable) 🎹 Use the sandbox to make music 🧮 Or explore turing complete contraptions

Me: Spends 13 years making game. Also me: Wakes up on release day to find the big RELEASE YOUR GAME button on Steam is no longer there... AFAICT, I'm "missing" an image that I've had for six years?!? Waiting for a response to my support ticket and feeling very defeated right now...

CADENCE HAS A RELEASE DATE!! ✅ Good shit puzzles! ✅ Makin' sick beats! ✅ Emotions & stuff! ✅ Pet the cat! ✅ 13 friggin' years in development! 🙀 Put it in your earholes 11 Feb 2026! youtu.be/YIN-nrFr7EQ Steam: l.madewithmonsterlove.com/wishlist iOS: l.madewithmonsterlove.com/ios_preorder

Localising Cadence made me understand I was influenced by the East more than I consciously realised... But also we're getting real close to shipped now!

Using Unity after several years absence: I've been pleasantly surprised to find state of most things is better than I remember it. Unity's IAP Purchasing is not one of those. Message from my future self: Just use RevenueCat...

It only took 12 years, but I have just implemented THE most important feature in Cadence... #PetTheCat

We're excited to announce that applications are open for the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant 2025 🎉 The grant will award $15,000 to five thinky puzzle game developers from all over the world, and a year's mentorship with genre veterans. Deadline: September 28th More info 👇 grants.draknek.org

Them: Just release your game, it's done right? Me:

If you like flies, this is for you. If you don’t, even more so. Either way, you should get it RIGHT NOW!

This is the most conceptually challenging tile in Cadence. Have been musing for years if I should even build it, and how on earth to telegraph it to users. Fitting the last piece of content is my best work to date - really happy with the polish here.

Paid Dreamhost $1000 over the last five years for a broken wordpress website because I was too lazy to port my email away from them. They rubbed salt in the wounds by making me pay an extra $20 cancellation for a "free" domain registration from over 10 years ago 🙄

Announcing our first game... Fool King Please join our Discord community to find out more! (Link in bio) #indiedev #gamedev #videogame

Today I was brutally attacked by truth...

This has been a brutal leadership lesson: Explaining an idea to a room full of 15 people, and getting 15 different interpretations back. Especially when nuanced. And that was just 15, not 400! I have a lot more sympathy for the derivative nature of AAA now...

Being an adult: having the money to buy fancy Lego. Also being an adult: waiting a year before finding the time to start building it...

I need to get over the idea I'm only capable of "programmer art". But also pulling off something you have no rights to is pure magic... perhaps I should start believing I can't program to recapture that beginners joy? Anyway, can't close Blender, because how cute is this guy I made?!? 🥹

An e.g. of how mad gamedev in 2025 is: Great, look at this niche games festival full of my prospective audience... ...with 477 niche games. That's more than the entire number of games that launched on Steam in the 2013, the year I started working on Cadence. 🪦

Cadence is a minimalist zen game about solving circuits to generate music. To find out what that means, there's a brand new Steam demo available as part of the #CerebralPuzzleShowcase by @puzzleshowcase.bsky.social! store.steampowered.com/app/362800/C...

Producing promotional material is my anathema, but seeing Cadence taking its final form is slightly thrilling...

Always immensely jealous of the games Alan designs... This game builds on previous titles in a really satisfying way!

PLAYTOPIA IS BACK ONCE AGAIN! playtopiafestival.co.za

Surprised things I've forgotten about are still making ripples: 10 years ago I participated in a game jam for, of all things, the Swedish traffic department. Someone recently got in touch with me because they are still using the game for youth outreach and they want to update it

Another unexpected use for AI: What colour is this random hex code? No guarantees it's right, but it's probably more accurate than my colour blind arse...

Good idea: Tell your discord you're working on game again after four years of radio silence. Bad idea: Do this yesterday, on Apr 1st. D'oh! Anyway, expect to see more Cadence updates here... or hop on discord for marginally more frequent news:

This article is ostensibly about Nvidia stock, but it's also a great 10000ft overview on the state of AI: youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/blog/05_the_...

Let's talk about $TRUMPcoin. Imagine that I have 100 dried kidney beans in my kitchen cupboard. I come to you and say, "See these kidney beans, they're magic! They're magic because I'm magic, and I've enchanted the beans. Each of these magic beans is worth $1-million!"

For most of my game dev career unit tests have been a bit odd and mysterious. I'm working on interaction code that's a swamp of edge cases. Defining them all in unit tests allows my brain to focus on the particular case I'm looking at, rather than trying to keep the whole thing in my head.

One of my favourite uses of AI so far: writing regular expressions. Needed to do a complicated search and replace with matching groups and tokens. It nailed it. Would have been a 45 min argument with regex syntax if left by my myself...

Started assistant teaching a university game design course for the first time since 2019. Using Unity. So many idiosyncrasies have piled up since then it’s kind of wild to talk new people through it. Here’s some…