April 2026 Newsletter [and a personal note] (Patreon)

Hello folks! I'd like to pretend I didn't post the newsletter on April 1st because I didn't want it to be construed as a joke, but really I just forgot.

What's going on in April 2026?

Well, the Supporters' Community Playtest will be on the 8th and 22nd this month. Those of you who are Discord members will be able to find the sign-up pinned in the playtesting/QA channel. Another thing for members to be aware of is that over the next week or so I’ll start posting the initial “expression of interest” from for the student work experience programming you’re running. This will be an opportunity for devs in the server to get some help from a 16-18 yo UK digital arts student, while also doing a good deed by providing them with work experience on a real game. That’s much better than sending them to make tea and coffee at a local data centre!

For those of you who are viewing this as Free Patreon members you can submit your games to Indies Under the Knife (which) continues every Thursday. The form is on indiegameclinic.com.

The April themes for IUTK will be;

9th - Fantasy Building [Little Tree Kingdom, Into the Depths, Scraptory]

16th - itch.io Browser Games Bonanza

23rd - Fantasy Tactics [Lootbane, Blood & Chaos, Heroes of Magic & Cards]

30th - Magical Wordgames [Wordlock, TypeCaster, Spellsy]

This will conclude a very fantasy-focussed few weeks. Then I'll try to pick a new meta theme and continue alternating the way we have been, mostly switching between thinky and action games on a week-by-week basis.

Thanks for everyone who already checked out all of March's content. If you missed any of these units of delicious content, they included;

The big collaborative "Playtesting Guide" video: https://youtu.be/zXNRJuc48Ek

a review of BiteMe's new game, nestled into a mini-essay on games about game studios: https://youtu.be/dsDQa-q4cSg

Joe & Tom's somehow-controversial discussion of Tynan Sylvester's Game Design book (which is quite a good book, but should probably called something like The Dude's Guide To Designing Deep Strategic Games For Dudes) https://youtu.be/RFSxLRBht14

a very last-minute devlog on my own game, which I tried to use as an opportunity to reflect on thematic pivots during a project, how these can be used to focus a game and orient it toward something which is fundamentally easier to work on and finish https://youtu.be/CbWpsNs7nrg

The next big video essay will be coming during April and will be a meta-level discussion about game design and theory. This one is going to take a little while to work out; I want it to be accessible without dumbing things down too much, so the YouTube version will probably end up edited down a little bit more, with a longer version on here as a reward... I don't think it's a topic I can adequately cover in less than 40 minutes, really.

And finally, a little bit of a personal note. (CW for the below; death/grief/loss/drugs).

Thanks to everyone who reached out with kind words about the death of my mum back at the start of the year. I made a quick jokey reference to it in my last dev log (a little gallows humour goes a long way with me) and since then, lots of people have been sending support and condolences. I really appreciate these, but I’ve also felt weird about accepting them. So while Indie Game Clinic is still small enough to be a personal project and one-guy-operation, I thought it may be worth using this platform to give a bit of context. Mainly because what I've been feeling (aka the "wrong kind of grief") might resonate with other people and make them feel seen in similar experiences.

Above is a photo of mum with me as a kid. The bike is decorated like that because we were on some sort of protest rally, probably for Friends of the Earth. My mum was a cool and inspiring person who was intelligent, creative, and passionate about the things she cared about. Unfortunately she also suffered from a known-but-never-treated personality disorder, as well as showing signs of other neurodivergent conditions, which - as is probably the case for many boomer-generation folks - went undetected throughout her life.

Most of my better memories of mum are from when I was a child. She always encouraged me to be creative and inquisitive. But she also found interpersonal relationships challenging for reasons I wouldn’t understand until the last few years.

Most of my education about friendships and romance was left entirely to my dad (who, ironically is more likely to be the person I get the majority of my autistic traits from) and to my own messy and sometimes dangerous trial and error. I do not feel like my mother was really emotionally present enough in her children’s lives to do much more than the day to day aspects of physical childcare, and this has impacted my relationships in ways I wasn't really able to recognise until the breakdown of my first marriage in my early 30s.

I think people see me at work or in the street, and see a slightly life-weary bookish bohemian - like some kind of game development Jarvis Cocker. My parents were both reasonably well educated and upwardly-mobile people from originally working class backgrounds, and to many people we probably just looked like a slightly eccentric but otherwise normal middle class suburban home. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that a lot of the adults I spent my childhood around were stoned most of the time. "Neglect" is probably too strong a word for it, but there were definitely some deficiencies in the type of nurture which was available. It's difficult to reckon with this history, to try to reconcile a gratefulness toward being brought up into art and craft and curiosity about the world, with these voids.

It's been hard to talk to people about mum's passing, not just because it's sad. It is sad, of course. I am sad about it and so is everyone else who knew mum. But it's also been a relief - and that's not how you're "supposed" to feel about a death in the family. I haven’t really been mourning my actual mother, but the thought of the woman she could have been in a better world, one which better understood how to help her.

During the last few years of mum's life, I visited her one or two times each week, if only briefly. But it would be wrong to say we were emotionally close. She needed a lot of help as her physical health deteriorated, and she was increasingly a very difficult person to talk to or be around. Her brain tended to create (and then retain and amplify) very strong, emotionally-distorted versions of people around her, especially new acquaintances like neighbours and care workers. This meant that toward the end, sitting with her and hearing her speak about her life was difficult because of her snippy social paranoia and pervasive sense that the world was inherently cruel and lonely.

Her passing wasn't the beginning of a bad period, but the end of one. And it's been hard to feel like I can authentically accept condolences, when the overriding emotion I’ve actually been feeling is more one of relief. The weeks since the funeral have been a time to remember Mum as she was in that photo, and not who she’s been in the last two or three years since things got bad.

None of this is nice to think or to write, but I thought it was worth explaining because I know there are people out there who will have been through similarly conflicting emotions, and it helps to know you're not alone. thanks for taking the time to read, and have a banger April.

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