Want to See What the Team’s Been Up To? (Patreon)

As I sit down to write this dev blog, I look back at what the team and I have been doing. It feels like not much changes each month. The leaves fall, the air gets colder, and life stays steady. Since May we have been all in on Project Evo. Everything felt new and exciting. Now we are heading back into SU. The excitement is still there, but it is more familiar. I know the story beats, the timeline, and the rhythm of building SU. It feels smooth and automatic. The good news is that progress on this update is moving better than ever. We already started sending assets over to Henshin which is a great sign.

Outside of Gunsmoke Games, we have all been living our own little lives. For me, it has been a lot of Evo work, messaging, and tracking metrics. But lately I have had a bit more time to relax. My wife ignored my inner Scrooge and put up the Christmas tree during the first week of November. The whole thing turned into a funny adventure. She wanted a tree from a craft store called Michaels, but it looked pretty weak in person. We needed light bulbs so I took her to Home Depot and she found this crazy tree with 950 LED lights. When we plugged it in I felt like Clark Griswold lighting up the whole block. We got home, she changed her mind, and sent me back to buy it, but the site said it was out of stock. So I tried to sweet talk the kid working there for the floor model. He laughed, walked me to a shelf, and there were three boxes left. Turns out it was going viral online. I just liked it because it reminded me of Clark, not because TikTok told me to.

SR7 has been dealing with his Dad a lot lately. His Dad is trying to understand retirement, which has turned into a bunch of wild ideas like driving across the country to convert random stuff into something else. When he is not trying to talk his Dad out of a new road trip, SR7 has been catching up on One Piece and finally building some Lego sets he bought during the pandemic. I asked if a new set in his house was recent and he said no, he had it “for a while.” Which always means “I bought it three years ago while panic ordering Lego during lockdown.” With all the rain checks and shipping delays back then, he still has sets showing up. One day his house might end up on one of those picker shows with a whole shed of Lego boxes.

Henshin has gone full retro. He revived his old PS2 and got an adapter that lets it connect to modern TVs. He even bought something called an Odv Gbs C, which sounds like a spell from Final Fantasy but is really just a cable. He has been replaying his original Persona 3 copy, which brought me right back to the PS2 days. I loved those blue backed discs. That whole era felt pure, without microtransactions, paid DLC, or half-finished games. Hard to believe it is considered “retro” now.

Talk to you soon from the whole team here atGunsmoke Games.