Oh boy. It's been years... almost 3. So much stuff has changed since I last posted.
This isn't exactly a weekly update - we all know that I've been terrible at that in the past. At this point I should just rename this series to "annual update."
Is this on? Can you hear me?
Phew. It is. Good.
I got married! I have 2 kids. I've worked at numerous companies since. I've also started my own companies. We're making some cool shit.
I've missed blogging. I keep a diary that I write in not super often, but when I feel like I need to write my feelings out so I can process them. I miss writing things for public consumption. I rebuilt this website over 2 days and I'm super proud of it. I may open source it in the future, but right now nah.
Traveling?
I went to New Zealand in Nov 2022, you can see some photos on my Instagram (I need to post more of them, I have literal thousands.). Right after that trip by a couple of weeks, I ended up flying to Toronto for a Christmas party. Then I went to Clearwater, FL right at the end of Dec 2022. I even went to Maui, HI for my honeymoon for a week - 10/10 will go again. Maui honestly deserves it's own blog post.
I've been to Washington, D.C., Nashville, TN, and some other places.
Married? Kids? Huh?
Yeah! Haha. I met an amazing woman years ago and we got married. She came with 2 kids and now I'm working on adopting them (such a long process). My kids are great, they're well... kids.
My son loves games and tech. I swear this kid is going to follow in my footsteps to some degree. He talks about how he wants to design games when he gets older - he's even said he wanted to work at TBS. He absolutely loves Fortnite and Minecraft. He's played our games and loves Backseat Drivers - he thought it was the funniest game ever. The giggling I was hearing while he played with our game director meant a lot to me, and it warmed my heart to see my son so happy.
My daughter-oh boy. She's a handful in the best possible way: a resident whirlwind of energy and creativity who keeps us all on our toes. She'll talk your ear off (our poor son can barely squeeze a word in!), and she'll happily fill an entire sketchbook in a single afternoon. Three years younger than her brother, she's still testing her independence, but every day she shows a little more of the confident spirit she gets from her mom.
Between my son's budding game-dev dreams and my daughter's unstoppable imagination, our house is basically an indie-studio incubator.
Companies? What fucking companies?
I started a little game studio called GhostJam Games® in April 2022, but it never really went anywhere - I still have it and it's going very very well. I also started another company in March 2025 called TUSKION™. I ended up "selling" GhostJam to the new company TUSKION to easily allow other owners, with LLC's you can't exactly have a shareholder.
I also joined an awesome game studio, but ended up leaving after 2 years.
Torn Banner Studios
I worked for TBS for 2 years. If you remember I worked for Lever Games on No More Room in Hell 2 for 1.5 years. Well, that company was acquired by TBS in Nov 2022 so I was hired and then kept working on NMRiH2 for another 2 years! Working at TBS gave me the industry experience that I needed and actually helped shape the way GhostJam runs. I learned things not to do and the other side of that coin - things to do.
I fortunately left before they did a mass layoff in Dec 2024, I left in Sept 2024. Some of my friends were let go - people I worked with for years - even before TBS. Our industry isn't too hot right now, I have a post about that coming soon. :)
GhostJam Games
GhostJam is a small indie game studio I founded to let me breathe from my day-job and create my own stuff. The company released 2 games and has released a demo of our 3rd. We scaled from 3 people to 8 in a matter of months. Our 3rd project Backseat Drivers is due to release in Q3 2025.
The demo also was Top 20 Most Played Demo - Steam Next Fest June 2025 (screenshot), it garnered over 1.1M players since it's release along with more than 170k wishlists. The Next Fest demo was up against ~2400 games and we were top 20. Crazy!
I learned quickly (unfortunately it wasn't as quick as I wish) that not worrying about code being perfect leads to progress. I remember years ago I complained about Blueprints in Unreal Engine and honestly, I didn't get shit done. At GhostJam we're using Blueprints almost entirely right now as we can iterate very quickly. We do write C++ for things that should be ported for either maintainability or performance. We also do things in a way where we can reuse it for future projects.
Work
As of recent I've been rebuilding the GhostJam website. I'm super excited about this new version. It represents what GhostJam is all about and it'll show that.
I've been mostly hands off from the latest game as of recent. I've been handling bizdev stuff, been speaking with publishers and the such. We haven't found any publisher that fits with what we're looking for. On this, we plan to release our pitch-deck etc after our release for others to take a peek at.
Oh yeah, I've also been writing a discord bot for our community. It'll feature things like private tickets, warning users, reporting users, and some other stuff. I'd rather build a bot than utilize 5 to do the things we want. I'll likely open source it when it's finished.
TUSKION
TUSKION is a holding company in structure, but a collaborative collective at heart. I founded it to bring together experienced creators from tech and gaming, pooling our skills and resources to build great products. Although TUSKION owns GhostJam Games, we stay hands-off with GhostJam’s day-to-day decisions, stepping in only to share expertise or support key projects. Crucially, TUSKION is fully private and member-owned—there are no outside VCs or investors—so every direction we take reflects the vision and commitment of the people who work here.
You can read more about TUSKION on our about page.
Work
I recently open sourced some packages for Django, django-pageviews and django-docvault. When I was building out the website for TUSKION it dawned on me that I could make some of the functionality into a package - which came in handy as I'm using them for the new GhostJam website (Soon™).
I'm sorry.
I sincerely apologize for not posting in so long. Honestly, I've been just living life and figuring things out. I'm planning to start writing more as it's therapeutic.
until next time