It’s 2019. How did 2018 go?

Wow! 2018 was an incredible year for us at Finji. Now that it’s 2019, we are back from the holidays and have finished our first week of development. Now that we’re back to normal schedules, let’s reflect on the past 12 months of Cool Stuff™. We say this all the time- but it never fails to humble us that we get to make games and live this weird life every single day.

E3 Cheese

But… we had a lot of low moments across all of our teams this year - personal struggles, exhausting travel, development bottlenecks, and illnesses. Things took too long and we had to redo the Overland UI for the 9000th time. We put so many hours into prepping for our Xbox Console Launch Exclusive announcement at E3 for TUNIC, hoping and stressing that we were making the right decisions as we prepped our demos and trailers and art assets. We have struggled with work hours, like all other development teams on earth. Figuring out what’s a good work-life balance for our collaborators and projects is an ongoing struggle.

I gotta say, though, we knocked 2018 out of the effing park. Our teams are healthy and happy. Adam and I are healthy and happy! We stood with the Night in the Woods team as they were nominated and won some of the highest honors in our industry (I am looking at you IGFs and BAFTAs). We put in the hours with our TUNIC team as they prepped the Xbox E3 announcement. We’ve taken our teams games all over the world and worked so many hours at conventions in order to meet up with y’all. We have been working with Playism to bring Night in the Woods to the Japanese audience. We rewrote the entire Overland codebase over 8 months as we moved closer and closer to our 2019 launch. We brought on a new publishing project, Wilmot’s Warehouse, a brilliant game by Richards Hogg and Haggett (with music by Eli Rainsberry). We launched our Finji Discord server and so many new friends have started baking bread because of that #Bredds-Im-Baking channel. We even took the goblins (aka mine and Adam’s kids) to the beach and Disney World.

BexAndNitw

As we move into 2019, though, holy moly! We have so much cool stuff planned. We will be at PAX South, PAX East, and PAX West. We will be on Train Jam heading up the Mentorship program again. We will pass y’all on the streets of San Francisco running from meeting to meeting at the Game Developers Conference- or simply running every morning at GDC Run. We have talks planned, mentorship meetings scheduled, business agreements signed. We will be launching A LOT of stuff this year. I think I have at least 3 launches planned? We will be launching Overland later this year! You know this is the game that Finji has been developing internally since 2014, right? I am 100% biased- but dannggg this game is good. I am so excited for y’all to see everything we are building for the 1.0 launch.

Anyways, thank you Finji friends for joining us thus far! Thanks for being so cool at shows. Thanks for being so cool on the internet. Thanks for talking to your friends about our games. We can’t wait to show you what we have in store for you in 2019 <3

<3 Bex (+ Adam)

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