We’re happy to announce our new project: The Old Flash of Nuraga is now live on Steam.

It’s a psychological horror game, where you’ll be excavating ancient artifacts together with your grandfather.

You can already visit the Steam page and add it to your wishlist, it helps a lot with the game’s visibility.

The Old Flesh Of Nuraga On Steam

We’ve just started this journey: the project is still very fresh, and the Steam page will be improved over time, also thanks to your feedback.

In the near future, we’ll share more details and insights about the game. If you’d like to follow development more closely, you can follow us on social media or join our Discord here: https://linktr.ee/studioortica

We’ll also be publishing new blog posts soon, where we’ll share some of our game development processes.

Thank you for the support. We can’t wait to show you more.

Subscribe now

Hello there birders!

Birds Watching has left its nest and is out on Steam. You can buy it at a discounted launch price, leave a review (which helps us a lot in getting the game noticed), and let us know what you think.

Play it on Steam.

Developing Birds Watching turned out to be a greater challenge than we originally expected. It took us five months instead of three to completed, and presented us with problems we had to struggle a bit with before finding efficient solutions.

Most of these difficulties boil down to the game being developed through the foundational stage of our company and being our first (small) open-world game, with actual non-linearity in place along your playthrough.

We made a game we’re very happy with in the end. We’ll share more details about the development cycle in a future post here on the newsletter, but we can already say that we learned a lot. Also, our next game will be smaller in scope ohohoh.

Thanks to all you readers, and apologies for the lack of new articles: we were really busy with Birds Watching! See ya soon!

Let’s fly!
Studio Ortica

Hello there ornithologists pals (fishing is water under the bridge at this point).

The demo for our next game, Birds Watching, the first birding psychological horror set on the Italian Alps, is partecipating in the Steam Next Fest right now. By showcasing the demo during Next Fest, we hope to bring the game in front of as many players as possible in preparation for its incoming release on March 6.

Is Birds Watching for you? If you played and liked Loan Shark, probably yes. If you enjoy first-person indie horror games, probably yes. If you like the idea of looking at the end of (your) world and at unexpected monstrosities through the lens of a pair of binoculars, then most certainly yes.

Visit our Steam store page, play the demo, let us know what you think about it, and, if you enjoy it, wishlist and share the game!

See you on March 6.

Fly high,

Studio Ortica

You can now buy LOAN SHARK on the Playstation Store.

Here’s the link: https://store.playstation.com/it-it/concept/10017396

That’s all.

More news on our new game soon.

We’ll also write about things we learned during the last few months.

Have a nice one!

To celebrate, we’ve cooked up a brand-new trailer. And it seems people are digging it, our friends at Dark Product even got us featured on IGN.

For your viewing pleasure:

The trailer was conceived, filmed, and edited by the incredible Andrea Folino, whose hybrid nature as a programmer, director, and photographer allowed him to create something truly special. The absolute madman digged his way into the engine and wrote his own custom tools to move the cameras around exactly the way he wanted.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, let the experts handle it. Dark Product is behind this amazing port, without them it wouldn’t exist, as we have absolutely zero knowledge on how porting works. Haptic feedback integration? What is that, something you eat?The game will be available on the Xbox Series X/S store starting January 13.

Wishlist it now and make sure you actually buy it when it drops: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/loan-shark/9P6V3JB95XLX

Today it’s going to be a short one because we’re talking about a simple concept: how do we choose which games to work on?

But we’re not going to talk about brainstorming strategies, which ideas are “good” vs. “bad,” market research, or basically how to evaluate ideas. Plenty of articles already cover that. Instead, we’ll focus on the process we use to give ourselves organized space to actually do it.

Let’s dive in.

Dedicated Brainstorming

First off, we try to avoid dedicated brainstorming sessions. We don’t like the idea of locking ourselves in a room and trying to force the next brilliant idea out of thin air. If we really need to come up with something at a specific moment, we prefer splitting up, going for a walk, jotting down whatever comes to mind, and then regrouping to discuss it.

We favor spontaneous ideas, the kind that emerge over time from chance encounters. Here’s our ideal process.

Catching the Spark

One of us has an idea. Maybe they just saw someone playing bongos in the park, dreamed about turning into a zucchini, or had a wild conversation that sparked a “we need to make a game about this” moment.

What happens next? They open the studio’s documentation and create an “Idea” note.

Inside, they include all the necessary details to understand it. For example, take The Last Ben, a game idea inspired by my climb of Ben Nevis in Scotland.

Whenever possible, I also like to add visual references—here, a series of photos I took during the climb, from base to summit.

The spark is captured. Now what? We let it rest. Occasionally, we revisit the note to add details or references, input from others, and so on.

Evaluation

Studio Ortica just finished a project and it’s time for a new one. What now?

First, we all sit together and evaluate the ideas added recently, using a range of parameters, each scored 1–5 at the top of the note.

The parameters are:

• Scope – in three categories: Art, Design, Tech. Influenced by many factors: importance, whether asset packs can simplify it, and overall size.

• Market Approved – how familiar the market is with a similar concept, how many successful games can serve as reference, and whether we see a real space for this game (e.g., indie horror market).

• Easy to Share – how easily the idea can be communicated with pop references, well-known games, or immediate concepts.

• Hot Score – the most important: how excited the team feels about it.

Using these parameters, we can query the notes in various ways, including assigning a strategic score with this formula:

The formula subtracts points based on scope, adds points for market validation and ease of sharing, and multiplies the total by the hot score—amplifying the value according to gut-feel excitement. This gives us a strategic score to keep the most enticing ideas in view.

Et voilà. We never start from scratch. We just reopen our idea database, check which ones make sense at that moment in the studio’s life, and start discussing them.

Birds Watching, for example, was a natural choice after Loan Shark: many technical elements overlapped, the scope was manageable, and it let us aim for a bigger game without burning out. Its strategic score was very high.

That’s why “choosing” is the key word. We’re full of choices, we don’t discard anything, and we rely on both the quantity and quality of our ideas.

Here’s a presentation where we definitively picked the next project after Loan Shark, exploring only ideas with the highest strategic score:

Sparks

Not all game ideas are “complete”; some are just sparks, suggestions to keep in mind. We have a dedicated space for all those sparks that could grow into something bigger: inspirations from real events, locations, player roles, gameplay ideas, narrative starters, art styles we like, production approaches, and more.

Random Inspiration

To complete the picture, I also created a small JavaScript function that generates a random seed and shows a combination of idea + random spark, right on the homepage of our documentation. This lets us revisit forgotten notes, get excited about potential future projects, and maybe even stumble on a lucky combo that sparks a genius idea.

Here’s the code:

$= (() => {
  const pages = dv.pages(’#progetto/idea’).where(p => p.file.folder != “Templates”);
  if (pages.length === 0) return “⚠️ No ideas found”;
  const seed = Math.floor(moment().unix() / (60 * 60 * 2)) + 1;
  const index = seed % pages.length;
  const p = pages[index];
  const alias = Array.isArray(p.aliases) ? p.aliases[0] : p.aliases;
  return ‘[[’ + p.file.name + ‘|’ + (alias ?? p.file.name) + ‘]V]’;
})()

You just need to change the filter (in this case, the tag #progetto/idea) to get different results.

And that’s that

Not much else to say, eh. I hope this post has been useful for some folks out there looking for a process to pick their next game!

Hello there! I’m Luca from Studio Ortica, the team behind Loan Shark, and in this article I’m going to talk about our first participation in an in-person event as Studio Ortica.

Some context first. On September 26th, we took part in UNIGHT – Notte Europea delle Ricercatrici e dei Ricercatori 2025, a popular science festival where scholars and students from the University of Turin spend an entire day (not a night, mind you) outdoors, showcasing scientific advancements straight out of the lab to passers-by.

Of course, we don’t make science, but we were invited by IGDA Turin to spend a few hours at their booth together with researchers from the GAME-ER project.

We spent our sunny Saturday morning enjoying the fresh air in the beautiful Parco del Valentino. We chatted with researchers, met colleagues from the local game dev scene, and interacted with visitors who stopped by our booth. It was really fun!

It was also our first in-person interaction with the public (albeit a generalist one) since we founded Studio Ortica. We came to the event with zero expectations (and, most importantly, zero preparation), and left with some ideas for our next public appearance.

I’d like to share the most interesting ones in this post.

People really want to play your game

We expected no more than a few curious stares. After all, we were simply presenting an indie game on a small laptop, while next to us students were showcasing scientific wonders like entirely new alloys. Contrary to our expectations, as the morning went on, we received a lot of genuine attention, especially from children.

Children are amazing players. They were enthusiastic about playing the game just for the sake of playing, even though the narrative and mechanics were quite obscure to them.

At one point, a group of five little ones gathered around our laptop, but only one could play at a time. Each of them was (quite loudly) asking for their turn. Seeing that much excitement for our game was really something.

Even more interestingly, almost everyone who stopped by the booth wanted to interact with us. The adults were curious about how the game was made and about our job; the children wanted to tell us exactly what they thought of our game and, most importantly, what they would change.

The most fun interaction was with two kids interested in making video games, one well-versed in Roblox and the other in scripting with Scratch. They had so many questions!

Toys are so fun. Bring them!

Remember the students showcasing new alloys? They had brought toys made from those same alloys. People could touch, move, and play with them to see the properties of the newly invented materials.

Physical toys promise fun much more clearly than video games, if only because they can be seen from a greater distance on your booth compared to a sun-scorched laptop screen.

In the playful context of in-presence events, people can get close, touch the toy, then get curious about your digital game and dive into it as well. I think there’s potential here that goes beyond just having merchandise. If you have something fun on your table, why shouldn’t a passer-by give your digital game a chance, too?

For Loan Shark, nothing would have worked better than a toy fishing rod for catching small prizes from a basket.

Bring pen and paper

We had lots of conversations with parents, colleagues, and researchers alike. Some of them asked for a contact to stay in touch. Asking them to take out their phones and note down our number felt a little intrusive, so we borrowed pens from another booth and used our brochures as makeshift notepads.

Next time, we’ll bring pen and paper. It may sound obvious, but it honestly didn’t cross our minds at the time. It’s the best way to share contacts without intruding too much.

Conclusions

Participating in the event was really fun! We met interesting people, showcased the game, and saw real-life strangers play it. It’s tempting to consider doing more in-person events.

For all the fun it was, though, being there likely didn’t gain us much in terms of sales or recognition. We make our money on Steam and reach new players through its algorithm powered by influencers, as Nicola highlighted in his previous post about Loan Shark’s marketing strategy.

In-person events are a nice treat for us because we love connecting with real people and being out in the world showcasing our work. But it would be too costly to make it a regular habit.

If we have the opportunity in the future, and it doesn’t cost us too much money or time that we could otherwise spend developing a better game, we’ll be there.

How did we get our game covered by so many people? Luck is part of it, the fact that the game is good enough is important, but another factor is our systemic approach to contacting influencers. Today, I’ll show you the system we use to track, organize, and manage such work: an Obsidian.md vault dedicated to influencers.

We’ve already shared how we use Obsidian for design documentation, if you’re interested in reading more.

This time, let’s dig into how it powers our influencer campagin.

The Influencer Vault

An Obsidian vault is just a folder of plain-text Markdown files, and these files can include matter properties, hyperlinks, queries and more. When we open our Influencer Vault, the first thing we see is a custom homepage note.

This homepage is our launchpad. From here, we can jump into any note, pull up project-specific dashboards, or run queries that give us real-time status updates on outreach.

On the left: the entire list of notes inside the vault. The majority are entity notes, one for each influencer, journalist, magazine, or platform we’ve interacted with.

Entities: The Building Blocks

Every influencer is represented by a note. we call these entities. Let’s open one.

I will show you the “pretty” Obsidian version, the one we work with, and the Plain Text one that’s behind the scenes (click to see the full picture).

Each entity contains structured properties like:

• Contact information (email, Discord, Twitter, etc.)

• Channel links (YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, whatever’s relevant)

• Audience size tier (small, medium, large, legendary, insane)

• Tags (Language, genre of content, type etc.)

Most importantly, we keep track of these aspects:

• Suitability for specific projects based on their past content

• Contact history for specific projects

• Key Distribution, and for which game

• Coverage status, whether they’ve actually played or mentioned our game

Below the properties, we add freeform notes: interactions, impressions, links to their coverage, and even tasks if we’re waiting on something.

Here’s another example: in Fox Play’s note, I have all their info at the top, and in the body I pasted a link to their Loan Shark video for easy reference. Simple, structured, and fast to use.

Every influencer note looks like this. When we want to contact someone new, we just create a new note, fill in their details, and add them to the vault.

Bringing It All Together

Entity notes are useful on their own, but the real magic happens at the project level.

Each game or demo gets its own Project Note. Inside, we use Dataview and Javascript queries to automatically pull and format information from all the entity notes.

Here’s a plain text version of the Loan Shark note:

And here’s how it actually looks in “Reader” mode:

The query gets formatted into a table that contains:

• All streamers that are suitable for the game and their size

• Whether we’ve contacted and sent them keys

• Whether they played the demo

• Links to their channels

• Their contact info so we can quickly follow up

All neatly displayed in a dynamic table that changes based on the information contained within each note. This transforms a mess of disconnected notes into a live dashboard. We have a real-time overview of who we’ve reached, what the results were, and where we should do next.

At the bottom of the note, we also run a query showing every influencer who has covered the game. In seconds, we can see which ones came through.

Using “Bases” as an Alternative

Obsidian recently released the Bases plugin, which basically gives you Excel inside your vault, very similar to the tables you can find in apps like Notion. You can display notes in a fully customizable table with filters, sorting, and views.

Here’s one of our bases: all the influencers who covered Loan Shark. It’s clean and fast.

The big advantage? You can edit fields directly in the table without opening each note. That makes it faster for bulk updates.

Bases are less customizable than Javascript queries, but the speed and convenience are hard to beat. We’re currently transitioning more of our workflows over to bases and may eventually ditch the custom queries.

Why Not Excel?

We did try Excel. For Dark Reality and the early days of Loan Shark, we tracked everything in spreadsheets. It worked, but it started getting messy pretty fast.

We switched for mainly two reasons:

1. Depth of information. In Obsidian, each influencer gets their own page where we can dump as much context as we want. No cell will contain my wrath.

2. Scalability. At Studio Carota, we want to make small, quick games. That means managing influencer outreach across multiple projects at once. With Excel, you either jam everything into one giant sheet or duplicate files per game, both of which get messy fast. With Obsidian, we just make a new project note and the system scales infinitely.

That’s all there is to it.

Sharing the Javascript Query

If you want to try our setup, I’d suggest starting with Bases. But if you prefer more customization, here’s the Javascript query we’ve been using with the Dataview plugin:

const filename = "YourGame.md";

function includesPath(array, target) {
  return Array.isArray(array) && array.some(link => link.path === target);
}

const pages = dv.pages('"entities"')
  .where(p => p["size-tier"])
  .where(p => includesPath(p["suitable for"], filename)) // Only include suitable
  .sort(p => p["size-tier"], 'desc');

function formatTags(tags) {
  if (!tags) return "";
  if (Array.isArray(tags)) return tags.join(", ");
  return tags;
}

function formatStreams(youtube, twitch, other) {
  const links = [];
  if (youtube) links.push(`<a href="${youtube}" target="_blank">YouTube</a>`);
  if (twitch) links.push(`<a href="${twitch}" target="_blank">Twitch</a>`);
  if (other) links.push(`<a href="${other}" target="_blank">Other</a>`);
  return links.join(" ");
}

dv.table(
  ["Name", "Links", "Email", "Size Tier", "Contacted", "Key Sent", "Demo Played", "Tags"],
  pages.map(p => [
    dv.fileLink(p.file.path),
    formatStreams(p.youtube, p.twitch, p["other link"]),
    p.email,
    p["size-tier"],
    includesPath(p["contacted for"], filename) ? "✔" : "❌",
    includesPath(p["keys sent for"], filename) ? "✔" : "❌",
    includesPath(p["games covered"], "YourGame Demo.md") ? "✔" : "❌",
    formatTags(p.tags)
  ])
);

Be sure to install the dataview community plugin and enable javascript in its settings to be able to use this.

As a plus, we also have this script that enumerates notes based on type and tells us how many people we contacted, how many keys we sent and how many covered us:

``` dataviewjs
const filename = "YourGame.md";

function includesPath(array, target) {
  return Array.isArray(array) && array.some(link => link.path === target);
}

const pages = dv.pages('"entities"')
  .where(p => !includesPath(p["ignore for"], filename));

const contactedCount = pages.filter(p => includesPath(p["contacted for"], filename)).length;
const coveredCount = pages.filter(p => includesPath(p["games covered"], filename)).length;
const keysSentCount = pages.filter(p => includesPath(p["keys sent for"], filename)).length;

dv.paragraph(`**Contacted:** ${contactedCount}  
**Covered:** ${coveredCount}
**Keys sent:** ${keysSentCount}`);


```

Conclusions

By building an influencer vault in Obsidian, we turned outreach into a repeatable, scalable process:

• Every influencer we talk to is documented in detail.

• Every game we launch gets its own project dashboard.

• Every contact, key, and coverage is tracked automatically.

This isn’t just about one game, it’s about setting up tools that will still work when we’re on our 10th, 50th, or 100th project. It’s easier to keep track of all the influencers that responded positively to our projects in the past and contact them with new games, and it’s also easy to see which ones don’t really vibe with our games and stop bothering them with undesired emails.

If you’re a fellow gamedev, I’d encourage you to start tracking influencers in a similar way. At the end of the day, influencer coverage isn’t only luck. it’s a system. And having that system is what got Loan Shark into the hands of some of the biggest names on the internet.

You may have heard of the game already, as several influencers covered it on YouTube and Twitch, including BigGaming64, Markiplier, CaseOh, penguinz0, ManlyBadassHero, Joe Bartolozzi, and many more.

At the time of writing, the game has been out for just over a month. But today, I want to rewind to a week before launch, to the day one of our TikToks went viral, quadrupling our wishlists just before release. That boost had a tangible impact on sales and visibility, and there might be some lessons here if you’re hoping for similar success.

Our Social and TikTok strategy

Before TikTok, we had been posting mainly on Bluesky and Twitter, but I’ve never seen that as “promotion”. I think those platforms are ideal to establish your presence online and try to get known, connect to other developers and such, but I knew we would never sell a single copy thanks to a BlueSky post.

At some point, I decided to start uploading videos on YouTube Shorts and TikTok, reasoning that it would be easier to reach random people there thanks to tags and the algorithm. So I created an account and just started posting.

So, what’s my strategy? Do random shit, but be consistent and post often.

@studio_carota@soloumido's reaction to Loan Shark's demo!#horrogame #gamedev #game #indiehorror #indiegames #games #godot #godotengine #shorts #thalassophobia #fishing #psychologicalhorror #boat #italy #eye #debt #loanshark #drowning #abyss #underwater

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I began sharing funny clips, clips of influencers playing the demo, or our talking fish Cagliuso insulting the player. I love making edits with music and atmospheric videos, and I also really enjoy memes, so naturally I threw those into the mix as well. Initially, our videos would get anywhere from 200 to 1,000 views.

How a TikTok went viral

One day, I wanted to post something new to keep our profile active, but I was out of ideas. So I dug through our Bluesky account and repurposed an old meme I had made there. It wasn’t a banger, but I still found it funny.

The video shows a fisherman drinking a beer, going to the back of their boat, and suddenly noticing a giant human staring at them. Panicked, they rush to a radio and play “La Cucaracha” to calm themselves. The clip was inspired by a Minecraft video I had seen a while back.

I pulled it from my hard drive and posted it on TikTok as it was, without overthinking it. I uploaded it on Friday, July 25th, and then went about my weekend, forgetting about it entirely.

@studio_carotahappy thoughts onboard #horrogame #gamedev #game #indiehorror #indiegames #games #godot #godotengine #shorts #thalassophobia #fishing #psychologicalhorror #boat #italy #eye #debt #loanshark #drowning #abyss #underwater

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This is the fifth video I’ve ever posted on that TikTok, as you can see from the list below.

When we returned to our desks the following Monday, we noticed a sudden spike in our wishlist graph.

It took a moment to connect the dots, but when I opened TikTok, the video had already reached 250,000 views. From there, it continued to grow, reaching 5.2 million views at the time of writing, and it kept bringing huge spikes to our wishlist count every single day.

To put it in perspective: all of our marketing efforts combined had accumulated around 1,000 wishlists over a month and a half, but that single TikTok drove 4,000 wishlists in just one week, hitting right in time for our launch.

Why did it go viral?

Obviously i don’t know, but other people predicted it. A comment left by a user on saturday, when the video only had 500 views, asked: “Why is this not viral yet?”. I can make some theories in hindsight, and I think these are the main reasons:

• It’s funny. Absurd, unexpected humor that grabs attention.

• Quick hook. The action is immediate; viewers understand the gag in seconds. Longer videos didn’t work at all.

• “Unexpected” Rewatch Value. Some people didn’t notice the giant bloated human immediately, got confused and rewatched the video three to four times, which increased engagement. When they got the joke, they had already spent some time with the video and could relate to it.

• Catchy music. That song is just funny and I love listening to it. Unironically, I think a catchy song is what made people appreciate the game’s ending in and of itself.

It’s just as important to study the misses as the hits. One example was a 41-second (!!) video I made about the game’s evolution. It was caught in the middle: too slow to grab attention, yet not slow or detailed enough to tell a compelling story of gradual transformation. At the same time, it failed to deliver quick “wow” moments that TikTok thrives on.

@studio_carotaHorror Game Prototype Evolution #horrogame #game #gamedev #indiehorror #indiegames #progress #games #godot #godotengine

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The result: people scrolled past. Not every idea will land, and that’s fine. What matters is learning why a video didn’t connect so you can refine your instincts for the next one. And even if you don’t, who cares, it’s all random sometimes.

Takeways

I want to share some thoughts about what happened, hoping that they might bring some insight to people reading this article. Here they are, in a non specific order.

TikTok is great even if you don’t live online

I’ve found that getting attention on Twitter and Bluesky requires following the “social zeitgeist” very carefully. You need to be aware of your environment and know how to use other people to gain more visibility. You need to reply to the right thread at the right moment, the goal often being to catch the eye of a bigger account so they’ll retweet you, opening the door to their audience. You need to know of #ScreenshotSaturday, pitch-a-thons, gamedev thread chains, call-for-wishlist posts, and god knows what else. I am not into that, as I don’t like spending a lot of time on social media.

TikTok, on the other hand, feels refreshingly simple: you just post, you know? Even a brand-new account with zero followers will usually get a few hundred views per video, regardless. I don’t need to use TikTok in order to post on TikTok. The platform gives every video a chance to find its audience, and if people interact with it, the algorithm pushes it further, snowballing reach. You don’t need to spend time on the platform, hastily chaining a tweet to some Mr. Bloobgus hoping he will retweet them, you just make your video, put it out there, and let the content do the work.

Don’t Chase Perfection, Repurpose Old Stuff

The video that exploded wasn’t polished, it was a repurposed meme I uploaded almost as an afterthought. Trying to craft the “perfect” post wastes energy. Instead, post often, experiment, and have fun. The more you share, the more chances you give the algorithm to work in your favor.

That video also had already failed once on Bluesky. Content that flops on one platform might thrive on another, or even on the same one at a different time. Never let a good idea die; recycle it, reshape it, and reintroduce it.

Tap into the power of existing memes

Coming up with a viral meme from scratch every time you post is impossible. Instead, lean on memes that already work. By taking an existing format and adapting it to fit your game, you give yourself a head start: the humor, timing, and familiarity are already there. All you have to do is make it your own.

The Game Still Has to Carry the Weight

While the TikTok boosted wishlists and visibility, I don’t think it made the game successful. Even without it, we likely would have seen coverage from YouTubers and streamers due to the game’s inherent appeal. Players wouldn’t have bought it if the concept didn’t click.

The real breakout moment came when the game entered trending lists on Steam, which significantly amplified reach and sales.

TikTok virality can be a booster, but it’s not a replacement for a good game or organic discovery.

Conclusions

As always, no one knows what they’re doing and we’re all just trying to have a good life making games. I hope this post gave you some insights and cool ideas about promoting your game. If it did, I’d like to read them in the comments, so feel free to share!

Leave a comment

In a future article, we’ll dive into Loan Shark’s first-month performance and break down sales. If you’re a gamedev looking for benchmarks, subscribe to make sure you get it in your inbox.

Studio Carota becomes Studio Ortica

As we move forward with our next project, we’re taking a moment to officially rebrand ourselves with a fresh new plant across our social media.

It was a necessary change because we found out that Studio Carota was already copyrighted in a similar form, and couldn’t be used as we wanted. So we parted ways with the carrot and started looking around.

This time we chose Ortica (”nettle”) because we like to make games that sting you. Just a bit. Not too much, not too little. If you played Loan Shark, you know what I mean.

Studio Carota branded the beginning of our journey as indie developers, and we’ll always love carrots. But now we want to move forward under our new, stingy banner and make games even more stimulating and thought-provoking.

Stay stingy!

Hello there! I’m Luca from Studio Carota. In August 2025 we released Loan Shark, a thalassophobia psychological fishing horror game about an indebted angler bargaining with a devilish talking fish. People seemed to like it.

I described the writing process that led to the final game in this article. Now, I want to talk about the three main problems that I had to solve as a writer and narrative designer during the production.

First, a couple of premises:

• Throughout the article I refer to my work as “writing”, but telling a good story in a game is much more nuanced than that, even for a non-technical designer like me.

• I use the term “I”, but writing a game in a studio as small as ours is more a collaborative effort than an individual feat.

Have a nice read!

Changing the goal of the game

As I mentioned in the previous article, we changed the overall direction of the game around mid-May, so one month and a month into production (out of a three month development cycle from April to June). We decided that we would make a better game if we focused on telling a compelling, disturbing story rather than setting up impactful jumpscares.

This radical change presented its difficulties. Back when the game had no particular ambition regarding its storytelling, I restrained myself from adding quantity and weight to the narrative so much that I could not get things done for the fear of weighing down the experience.

After we decided to embrace this change (which had been slowly happening over a couple of weeks under the push of playtesters feedback and our creative instincts), I knew I had to write a good game, but still felt lost, though for different reasons: I had ideas, too many, but often found it difficult to prioritize one over the other.

The game had a very solid, gripping concept (fishing out at the sea while haunted by debt), but there were many possible implementations in terms of tone and themes. Where to go?

The constant conversation with Nicola and Rumpelstiltskin was most of the time what I needed to regain vision of the whole project and move the narrative forward, without compromising the gameplay and the atmosphere. Plus, playing the game with a critical eye helped a lot.

It was sometimes stressful, I have to admit. Yet, we shipped a game whose narrative people seemed to enjoy: mission accomplished.

Building a reverse power fantasy

I have grown up playing games with multiple choices and sprawling consequences, mostly role-playing games. Some of my favorite gaming memories stem from games like Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Alpha Protocol (really an embarassingly number of Obsidian titles here).

As you will see, most of my favorite games are about power fantasy of some sort. The interesting thing about Loan Shark was to create for the player a reverse power fantasy where they would be abused, manipulated, and gaslighted by the villain. This was intended to be the main source of horror and uneasiness.

That is why breathing life into Cagliuso was probably my most demanding writing task, and why it took me three major drafts to really get him. He is the centerpiece of the experience, the abuser. Without him written convincingly, the game would fall flat.

I had already worked on an abusing character (Morgan Le Fay from Dark Reality). To an extent, Cagliuso is an improvement over what I did with Morgan. But Morgan was only a piece among many in the sum of Dark Reality.

Laying down functional dialogues for Cagliuso to convey mechanics, information, and plot points was relatively easy. The hard part was to actually make him feel like a disturbing abuser. He is a ruthless, manipulative loan shark disguised as a magical assistant. How should he talk?

I did not try to make him feel like the standard villain I may discover from a YouTube search of movies, tv series, and so on. Instead, I drew on personal experience, and tried to abstract patterns and motifs I could then implement in Loan Shark.

The experiences I drew upon are mundane: that bully from middle school; that problematic colleague I could not get along with; that public figure I have strong feeling about. These are types of people every one of us met at some point in their life.

Because of this, I think everyone can relate to dealing with someone as Cagliuso. Every one of us met a selfish, arrogant, or simply unfriendly person. Loan Shark is a game about being stuck on a boat and working with that same person, who now is also a sociopath.

Creating an avatar for the player

Finally, I was surprised by how the characterization of the playable character turned out. At the beginning of the development, we decided to provide the player with an avater rather than with a character. We had already tried a character-centric approach with Dark Reality, and while incredibly rewarding in the long term, it can be challenging to pull off in less than an hour of game.

At the same time, we avoided as much friction between the diegetic situation and the player so that they could immerse in the game and get scared. A well-defined character to control and discover could distract from the moment-to-moment action and distance the player.

To meet this goal, I purposely wrote dialogue choices with generic answers, mostly limited to “yes or no”, at decision points. I still wanted to have multiple choices, because they made the dialogues much more interesting to read.

Except that playtesters did not like this direction at all. They felt limited in their expression, and that the answers sounded simplistic when not dumb. In fact, the generic nature of the answers broke their immersion more than a set of refined choices.

I was surprised! I had avoided placing actual content in the dialogue choices so much that they made no sense to the players. Hence, I changed direction. I rewrote the choices in their entirety, added more color and variety.

I also experimented a little with providing the player avatar with a generic yet more defined familiar background, in order to give the loan sharks an entity to threaten.

However, this put the spotlight on the avatar’s feeling, not the player, and it distanced them from the game as we originally feared. So no background apart from the “you’re in debt, go fish”.

Conclusions

It is strange to retrospectively see how significantly the quality of the narrative improved over the final weeks of development. What made that improvement possible was embracing our shape as a team instead of forcing ourselves into a different mold.

What is our shape? We are a writer turned developer (that is me) and a generalist designer with a knack for production and experiential design (Nicola). We should not make streamer horror games if that is not what we like doing.

Instead, we love to tell impactful stories with simple game loops (like we are trying to do with our next game, Birds Watching). Loan Shark reminded us of that, and showed that there is an audience for the kind of games we like to make. I think a young studio like ours cannot ask for a better result from their first commercial project.

Also, I may say that changing the direction of your game halfway through development is not ideal if you want to avoid unexpected difficulties. But that is obvious, isn’t it?

Plus, what made Loan Shark what it is today stemmed from that change. If we had opted to stick to the initial plan instead of following our instinct, we would have probably shipped a mediocre streamer horror.

With this, I have said everything I think it matters about writing Loan Shark. I hope that it was an interesting read! It was interesting to write for me.

Feel free to reach out if you would like to have a chat about Loan Shark, game dev or game writing! You can find me on Bluesky or at luca.folino30@gmail.com.

You can follow Studio Carota on Bluesky and X as well, to stay updated on our work. We also have a Discord where you can find Nicola and me online at bizarre times.

Thank you for reading!

Hello there! I’m Luca from Studio Carota. Last month we released Loan Shark, a thalassophobia psychological fishing horror game about an indebted angler bargaining with a devilish talking fish. It did well.

Loan Shark is a narrative game focusing on written storytelling, but it was not conceived as such. In this article, the first of a two-part series on Loan Shark, I want to document how the game was originally conceived, and how it ended up shipping.

First, a couple of premises:

• Throughout the article I refer to my work as “writing”, but telling a good story in a game is much more nuanced than that, even for a non-technical designer like me.

• I use the term “I”, but writing a game in a studio as small as ours is more a collaborative effort than an individual feat.

Have a nice read!

Pre-Production

Conceptualizing Loan Shark was a journey in itself. In January 2025, Nicola and I released Dark Reality, the demo for a larger dark fantasy RPG. It was an interesting game to write and design: as an actual RPG, it had a lot of text, scripted moments, collectable items, and lore. I spent three weeks (out of three months) refining solely worldbuilding.

Yet, while Dark Reality was very exciting to work on, it was also overscoped. For the next game, we wanted to commit to something smaller. Therefore, we spent February and March searching for the perfect idea (it was a very fruitful period that I will probably write an article about later in the future). Nicola even made a digital prototype of a later discarded idea: Strip Mining.

At the end of March, we had more than one hundred pitches in our Obsidian vault (we use Obsidian, as Nicola discussed in this article), mostly horror games concepts that intrigued us (we chose to focus on horror games for many reasons, most of them discussed here by Chris Zukowski).

After a long selection, we landed on HELLISH FISH (working title): a horror game set on a boat where you are haunted by a giant shark. The game would feature a simple narrative and sparse dialogues, since I personally wanted to get better at technical tasks and focus less on creative writing for this project.

If you have played Loan Shark, you know that it is a very different game from the one I outlined in the previous paragraph. How we moved from the initial vision to the shipped game is the matter of the writing timeline.

April

In the first half of April, on the first day of work on Hellish Fish, Nicola and I sat in a nice park with our notebooks and water bottles. Under the trees, we outlined the basis for Loan Shark.

It would be a fishing game and the horror would come from this gigantic Shark haunting you under and out of the water. Inspired by sport fishing games like Rapala Pro Fishing, there would be a water cam centered on the bait. In the role of an angler, the player would fish and be jump-scared by the Shark multiple times, leading to a climatic ending where the Shark would devour you and your boat.

As Studio Carota, we strive to add something personal to our games. That is why we then inserted the themes of debt and working conditions: the angler would owe money to the mob (or, even more frightening to some people in Italy, to the tax authorities) and have a single night to recoup their massive debt. Metaphorically, the Shark would stand for both the creeping creditor and the self-destructive financial behavior of the main character.

I wanted a way to better expose background and provide sparse (or so I believed at the time) conversation to the player. I was thinking of a phone line to the creditor, but Nico came up with a much more inspired idea: a talking fish you would catch yourself. Enter Cagliuso.

Cagliuso would be the emissary/victim/accomplice of the creditor. We still had vague ideas about his role in the story, but it did not bother us particularly: it was a streamer horror after all, wasn’t it? The story could come later.

Until the second half of April, we just prototyped the game in Godot and researched other fishing games for inspiration. Nicola took the heavier duty of creating the underwater loop, while I worked on the loop on the boat. After some weeks, we had an interesting core experience and playtested it to promising results.

Cagliuso had already taken a central place in the overall game, and I wrote his dialogues from beginning to end. There were fewer dialogues compared to Dark Reality, but the conversation part of the loop was still becoming larger than expected.

From a story and design point of view, the game at this point was very different from what it shipped. For example, the bell you use to conjure Cagliuso was absent, and he would constantly be on the boat; moreover, there was no Ciruzzo at all.

Despite this, looking back, it seems to me that most of what made Loan Shark the game that it is was already there, at least at a functional level. There were still many flaws to which I could not see immediate solutions, however. What I needed at the time was to grind.

May

May felt like a long grind to me indeed. I wrote sparsely. There were responsibilities in the studio that occupied me (like setting up the Steam page with Nicola, or dipping my toe into Italian bureaucracy). But mostly, I felt stuck, like my part in the game was finished.

It was not, as I mentioned earlier: there were fundamental refinements to the dialogues and formatting that still needed to be addressed; the tone was inconsistent throughout; there were gaps in the pacing. A lot of work, and yet I was always unsure about what to do and how to do it.

In retrospect, I believe there was uncertainty in me stemming from the original vision for Loan Shark, that is, of a more experiential and less verbose game. It was not just about having more dialogue; rather, I had difficulty fitting into the overall direction we had set.

While this month felt taxing to me, the best changes to Loan Shark took place right through May: the golden fishes; the bell; the many moments of looming tension; the themes of hopelessness, dreams and ambitions shattering against social inequalities; the final version of the ending.

I think it was relatively easy to place on the table all the primitives of what made Loan Shark special. It is way more difficult to polish and elevate each primitive while staying true to the original vision, integrating feedback, and simply being consistent every day. In other words, we metaphorically fertilized the soil for a month; it was not as fun as throwing the seeds. But then came the harvest.

June

And what a great harvest June was, for my part and for the game in its entirety. I started the month with a productive burst, adding new content and completely rewriting all conversations.

I then took another small break from writing to focus on finishing the trailer and helping Nicola in uploading the demo he had set up for the Steam Fishing Fest, which was the public debut of Loan Shark.

After promising reception during the Fishing Fest, I focused on a final writing session. We strive to keep in line with our schedule, but I was anxious about the quality of the writing and worked into the first week of July.

To hit the target, I played the game multiple times focusing as much as I could on the bigger picture emerging. I took copious notes, and tried to formulate as clearly as possible what were the problems in the writing and how I wanted to fix them.

Too many times in the previous months I had just gone berserk with the keyboard adding conspicuous quantity of content, only to realize not everything was fitting later.

Conclusions

I am very proud of the final result despite all the flaws the narrative still bears. Players loved the concept, the characters and replayed the game multiple times to explore all the possibilities.

Many reviews told of players relating to the situation described in the game in one way or the other. No greater satisfaction for me than to connect with these actual people.

The follow-up to this article will focus more on the specific problems I had to address to get to a coherent and compelling narrative. Less fun facts, more reflections on the craft.

In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you would like to have a chat about Loan Shark, game dev or game writing! You can find me on Bluesky or at luca.folino30@gmail.com.

You can also follow Studio Carota on Bluesky and X to get updated on our work! Or join our Discord, where Nicola and I can be found online at unreasonable hours.

Thank you for reading!

Small update: we were interviewed!

Professor Francesco Toniolo, Italian video game and media expert, reached out to us to talk about Loan Shark. You can find the full interview here.

The interview is in Italian, but if you want to know more about us you can still enjoy it thanks to translated subtitles.

This is the first professional interview we released since starting Studio Carota. While it will not a defining moment in the growth of our studio (media exposure very rarely is), it is a milestone in the long journey to enstablishing ourselves, in Italy and abroad, as a professional and competent game studio.

Plus, talking with someone as passionate as Francesco about Loan Shark was incredibly rewarding.

Now, time to get back to work.

To the next update!

In this article we’ll talk about game design documentation.

The person that’s writing this is speaking from the perspective of a two-person team working on an indie game. That means minimal coordination, but we still need a space to think, discuss, specify, record, and brainstorm.

And we’re suckers for documentation—not the bloated kind, but the kind that helps you trace back a decision months later, empower your thinking and enhance your work.

In this article, I’ll show you how we’ve built a lightweight, living documentation system using daily design notes, how it works in practice, how we use tools like Obsidian.md to support it, and why it’s become a core part of our creative workflow.

So, what approach do we use?

Game Design Logs

There’s a great old blog post by Daniel Cook on Game Design Logs. It outlines a form of lightweight, evolving documentation built around the game prototype, meant to capture daily insights and guide development without ever becoming a static wall of text.

The concept is simple:

• Skip the massive GDD.

• Start with a rough idea.

• Build a playable prototype as fast as possible.

• From there, maintain a single, growing document where, every day or two, you log:

  • Play Notes – What worked and what didn’t in the latest build.

  • Next Steps – Prioritized, actionable improvements.

  • Tasks Accomplished – What’s been done since the last entry.

  • Experiments – Risky or bold changes you’re testing.

It’s simple, but powerful. You’re not writing for posterity. You’re writing for momentum. The design log becomes a timeline of real decisions grounded in actual play. It reflects what really happened, not what you intended to happen.

It’s collaborative, iterative, and built for people making the game right now, not future stakeholders or publishers.

I’ve loved this approach since university. It’s what inspired our current documentation system for Loan Shark, which uses the same philosophy but is not exactly the same.

Our Setup

Let’s get practical. Here’s how we organize our docsss.

We use a sourced Obsidian.md vault for documentation.

Obsidian is a powerful Markdown-based note system that supports backlinks, queries, plugins, and tons of automation if you want it. By “sourced” we mean that we sync our markdown notes using Github.

In essence, it’s a glorified text editor.

Whenever we open the vault, the homepage note presents itself:

Through queries, we automatically display:

• This week’s note.

• Number of meetings and playtest notes.

• The five most recent updates.

Daily Notes

We have plenty of different kinds of notes in the vault, such as meetings, weekly notes, games we use as reference, and so on, but we’ll get into them in the future.

Today we are interested in our Daily notes.

What we don’t have is a Game Design Document, or any other type of long form document for that matters. After we discuss the game we jolt down a brief objective, a vague intent and jump straight into prototyping. We use the Periodic Notes plugin (paired with the Calendar plugin) to automatically generate a new empty note every day.

Each daily note is a scratchpad for thoughts, design questions, diagrams, brainstorms, and tasks. Here’s how an empty note looks:

There’s a title, some metadata and two sections: “Luca” and “Nicola”, where each one of us takes notes. We divided it this way because we don’t want to pay for Obsidian Sync yet (we’re broke) and we want to avoid conflicts when merging with source control.

Whenever we need, we just jot stuff down. It’s the fucking wild west over there. Some examples…

• A list of design questions that we had to answer and a sketch with the design of our fish state machine

• Reasoning about current priorities, how to add pacing to the game by writing and modeling the game state on an in-app diagram sketching plugin.

• Embedding an older Daily Note section containing some research done by Luca on Fishing World, about the obsession of fishing games with describing the location you’re fishing in and wondering if we could put an horror twist on it. (We didn’t include it in the end, as you can see by the thumbs down)

Building work from notes

Obsidian plugins let us do more than just journal.

We use the Tasks plugin to tag to-dos, questions, and ideas. Using simple queries, we automatically generate prioritized lists across our vault.

These queries pull ALL the entries from ALL the Daily Notes and generate lists of all kinds for us. We use different symbols to mark design questions, production items, marketing tasks, etc.

It lets us do stuff like:

• Querying design questions that need to be solved.

Make a list of every random idea we have every day.

It’s simple but scalable. We don’t spend time organizing this stuff—it emerges naturally because we write stuff down when we need to, over time instead of all in advance.

Static docs still exits (sort of)

Sometimes, you need to refer back to a specific system, mechanic, or decision. Of what use are daily design notes if you need to find something specific?

First of all, there’s a powerful search feature in Obsidian. But let’s pretend that doesn’t exist or you somehow can’t think for any specific terms that you want to search for. We still have static documents.

Instead of writing a clean “master document,” we just link to the daily note that best captures specific bits of information. These become our “Maps of Content.”

On our homepage, we have a dashboard linking to MoC notes.

Each one just links to daily notes content.

If we update something? We don’t rewrite the MoC note. We link to the new daily log that contains the updated decision or plan.

For example, take a look at the “Game Beats” document.

It contains information about the order in which various game beats need to happen in the game, but it’s just a link to a daily note containing the most recent information about that topic.

This note has changed multiple times as our vision evolved. And ironically, the current version is out of date—but we didn’t bother updating it again, because it wasn’t relevant anymore. That’s part of the flexibility.

Advantages

The biggest win is that this approach is burden-free. You don’t have to think about where to write something or whether it’s “worth” documenting. You just open the daily log and write IF YOU NEED TO. It’s flexible, fast, and doesn’t interrupt your momentum.

You’re not maintaining a system—you’re using it to think. That alone removes a lot of the friction that comes with traditional documentation. There’s no cleanup, no polishing, no second-guessing. You can write messy thoughts, contradict yourself, and change your mind the next day. That’s part of the process.

Over time, the log becomes a living timeline of the project. You can go back and see exactly when a decision was made, what influenced it, and how it evolved. That history is invaluable—especially when you’re lost, burned out, or trying to explain your game to someone else. We love diving into Daily Notes during post mortems to refresh our memory on how development evolved.

It also keeps the team in sync without the overhead of meetings or constant messaging. Even without Obsidian Sync, we stay updated just by reading each other’s notes. It’s asynchronous communication that actually works. I love catching up on Luca’s notes and see how his day went.

Because everything is tagged or structured loosely with symbols, we can query things later—like design questions, tasks, ideas—and build dashboards from what we’ve already written. That means no upfront organization but plenty of useful structure when you need it.

Most importantly, this method reflects how we make our games: we test, reflect, adapt, repeat. The documentation grows with the game, not ahead of it.

Limitations

If you have 8+ people and you rely on documentation as the primary communication channel, this can become messy fast. You’ll need guardrails:

• Link to the latest version of any system from a central source

• Maybe designate “clean” documentation summaries alongside the daily chaos

• Enforce tagging and metadata conventions

But for us—a two-person team who talk every day—it’s perfect.

Conclusions

If you’re looking for a lightweight but powerful way to think out loud and track your game’s evolution, give this journal-like philosophy a shot.

Don’t over engineer it. Don’t write a big doc. Just write a little, often—and make sure the prototype keeps moving forward.

You’ll be surprised how much clarity emerges when you give your thoughts a place to live.

And if you liked this post, subscribe to our newsletter for more (genius) game development insights.

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If you’re a small team (or a solo dev) working on your first or second game, read this carefully. We want to talk about the power of demos through the concrete impact the demo had on our game Loan Shark.

There’s a lot of people online telling you that you MUST release a demo if you want to boost your visibility, but at first we weren’t planning on releasing one at all.

Our thinking was: Loan Shark is short. Giving players a chunk of it for free would just eat into the core experience. Wouldn’t they play the demo, then feel like they’re just paying for the rest two thirds of the game?

But then we played Mourning Tide’s demo — and everything changed.

Mourning Tide had a demo that was barely ten minutes long. A small slice of gameplay, perfectly polished, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It teased the story, introduced the mechanics, and then ended with a beautifully crafted, high-impact moment that left us wanting more.

That’s when it hit us: Making a short demo is fine if your game is short. You just need a short teaser to hook people. To show them what’s special about your game and then close the curtains before they’re full.

So we got to work.

The game was already mostly done, so it only took a day of tweaking: reordering some scenes, polishing up rough edges, putting in some demo-specific buttons and UI, and preparing for the terrifying task of actually releasing something publicly on Steam for the first time.

We launched the demo on June 23rd, 2025.

What Happened Next

Within a few hours, total strangers started playing the demo on stream. At first, it was Wounds. Then came SoloUmido. Then a PowerNana video dropped. And the ball started rolling.

Within the next two weeks various youtubers and streamers started picking it up naturally. Some even had hundreds of thousands if not millions of subcribers.

The demo traveled overseas, to Japan:

All of this happened because the demo simply existed. We didn’t DM these people. We didn’t hustle on Discord. They found it on their own, and because there was something playable, they could engage with it immediately. The visibility spike was insane.

We then started sending emails, to maximize exposure. We collaborated with youtubers that worked with us in the past already, like YeenaGames:

This demo also opened the door to some traditional coverage, like this Horror Fuel piece and even a Game Spark featuring.

The Numbers

Let’s talk results. In the first two weeks of the demo’s release, we’ve got:

• Demo downloads: 1,569

• Unique players: 455

• Reviews on demo page: 14 (all positive)

• Total Wishlists before demo: 292 (gained in over a month)

• Total Wishlists after demo: ~800

The bump in wishlists alone was worth it. This demo did more for our exposure in two weeks than an entire month of other endeavors.

Lessons Learned

The first lessons is that if you’ve ever burned out trying to write daily tweets, or pouring energy into Reddit posts that get zero wishlist conversion, or emailing press outlets that ghost you, this part is important:

A good demo markets itself.

When a piece of your game exists in the world and is actually fun to play, people with audiences will find it. And when they play it, they’re doing your marketing for you.

You don’t need to build a massive community from scratch — the right content can hijack other people’s platforms, ethically and effectively. That’s exactly what happened to us.

There’s another massive bonus to releasing a demo: feedback from strangers.

You’ll finally get out of the echo chamber of friends, fellow devs, or Discord pals. You’ll see people react live to your game — your jokes, your beats, your pacing — and you’ll learn what hits and what flops.

That kind of raw signal is priceless.

We spotted a few UI issues. A line that didn’t land. A mechanic that felt clunky. Nothing major, but enough to tighten the screws before release.

And beyond the practical side? Watching real people enjoy something you made is the single greatest morale booster.

What We Did Wrong

That said, not everything was sunshine.

We made some mistakes:

• We missed the Steam Fishing Fest. Had we timed the demo to drop during the event, Steam might’ve promoted it, giving us even more traction.

• We didn’t participate in Steam Next Fest. There wasn’t one during our release window, but looking back, maybe we could’ve delayed or adjusted plans to make it happen. That’s a massive eyeball magnet.

• We didn’t plan the launch push. We just released the demo and waited. Luckily, it worked out, but a stronger day-one media blast — emails to YouTubers, a proper trailer, community posts — could’ve compounded the attention and made it snowball faster.

Lesson: don’t just release your demo. Launch it. Plan. Coordinate. Send 100 emails. Drop it during a festival. Make it a big deal. Because the demo isn’t just a free trial — it’s your marketing spearhead.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the TL;DR:

• Demos create visibility.

• Demos create feedback.

• Demos create momentum.

And if you time it right, accompany it with smart outreach, and polish the hell out of the first 5–10 minutes of your game, that demo might just be your breakout moment.

We made Loan Shark as a test project. Something small to learn Steam’s backend, polish our pipeline, and see what releasing a commercial game felt like.

And now, thanks to a one-day demo build, it’s out there — in articles, in streams, in player’s hands.

So if you’re a small dev reading this?

Make a demo.

If you liked what you read and want to read more articles like this one, consider subscribing!

And if you want to help us out on our Indie journey, please consider wishlisting Loan Shark on Steam!

Hello there fisherpeople!

We are hitting a small but significant milestone for the growth of our studio: the official Discord server for Studio Carota is open!

What Discord server?

Actually, it has been open for a couple of months; we simply didn't announce it in grand style. We were a little self-conscious about the server and its appeal, and instead opted to focus on the development of Loan Shark.

Now that Loan Shark is almost completely finished (Nicola is hunting down the remaining bugs as I'm writing this announcement), we feel it is time to shine some light to the server.

Why a server?

"Because every great indie studio has one, duh."

Wait! It was a joke... to a certain degree. It is true that a lot of great indie studios have a Discord server, because Discord is a great way for developers to interact with their community.

That's our goal, really. We've seen people noticing us and our game. We would love to hear from those people and get to know them better. We would love to get to know you better. Talking about our games, the games you like, the games we like.

Discord is not so much a bridge to a community as it is a base to build a community upon. We use it for everyday work, for connecting with friends, for playing online... why not use it also to reach out to you, our players (current and future)?

Here's the server!

Let’s do a little recap:

• join the server and chitty chat with us;

• try the Loan Shark demo;

• wishlist the game.

And if you are in the mood for clicking links, you could also go .

And later you could .

Happy fishing and thank you for reading!

Hello there!

Today, we want to share a little more about the journey behind Dark Reality, this time discussing our main game references. In our previous post, we recounted how Dark Souls and King's Field IV kindled the flame (pun intended ohohoh) of inspiration and led us to Dark Reality.

FromSoftware's games, however, informed only the first iteration of the concept. As Nicola and I moved forward with the development, we needed to further define the game's direction. To help us, we studied games that we liked and resonated with the vision of Dark Reality.

In retrospect, we built Dark Reality on way too many references considering the limited scope we were aiming for. Audience reactions after launch confirmed that the game is indeed meaningful but is spread too thin trying to fulfill too many goals and explore too many themes at once.

To take into account the insights we have gathered so far, we'll highlight not only what we took from each reference but also how we could have used them better.

Silent Hill 2

We felt that, to make a game about the inner journey of a broken character, we couldn't avoid referencing Silent Hill 2. We revisited the game multiple times while working on Dark Reality, and it helped us solve many doubts.

Silent Hill 2 is an incredibly immersive game and, even more than twenty years after its initial release, it’s impressive how rich its presentation is; just look at James’s 20-minute walk at the beginning of the game, particularly in terms of sound design. We wanted to achieve something similar.

However, we fell into two pitfalls. The first was underestimating how difficult it would be to reach that level of polish. As a personal example, I spent an entire day refining the sound effects of Dark Reality's outdoor forest area, only to realize it wouldn't significantly improve the player experience. Reaching Team Silent’s level of polish was simply unachievable in three months given the game's scope and our skill level.

The second pitfall was aiming for the same grandiose sense of immersion as Silent Hill 2, despite the fact that Dark Reality is a very different kind of game. While the former is a photorealistic (for its time), highly detailed 3D game focusing on real-time combat and realistic exploration, the latter is a low-poly dungeon crawler with a high degree of visual abstraction whose gameplay focuses turn-based encounters and movement on a grid.

Adhering to the conventions of dungeon crawlers rather than striving for immersion could have actually enhanced both the game and its themes. The problem was that, at the time, it was difficult for us to see that these two goals—creating an immersive game and making an '80s-style dungeon crawler—were in conflict.

If we were to move forward with the development of Dark Reality or come up with an entirely new game in the same genre, we would prioritize creating a solid dungeon crawler first, then bend its rules to our desire.

Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land

Since we were making a game in an already well-established genre like the dungeon crawler, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we sought out a solid reference to guide Dark Reality's gameplay.

We studied many dungeon crawlers, both recent (like Islands of the Caliph) and classic (like Eye of the Beholder II). In the end, we found that Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land best matched our idea of a narrative dungeon crawler built on a grid with focus on character arcs and world exploration.

We had a highly-polished, well-presented game to take inspiration from but still, like we highlighted discussing Silent Hill 2, we didn't end up with a proper dungeon crawler. Why? Because we prioritized the narrative over the gameplay and assumed that a game loop too strong would divert the attention from the mood and the story.

Spec Ops: The Line

Dark Reality aimed to deconstruct players' expectations about knightly quests, chivalry, and other Arthurian fantasy tropes. Many games critically examine either a theme or a genre, but we felt that Spec Ops: The Line did both in an exceptionally refined manner.

This third-person shooter employs traditional action-oriented mechanics to lure players into unexpected narrative twists. We tried to achieve something similar with Dark Reality. Our biggest challenge was balancing the loop of a proper dungeon crawler while also exploring gameplay and thematic subversions.

We only partially succeeded, as the gameplay in general—and combat in particular—weren’t deep enough to make the player feel like they were truly in a classic '80s RPG, like we already noted.

Fear & Hunger

Of all the references mentioned above, Fear & Hunger may be the most significant and, paradoxically, the least explored in the final game. While it is set almost entirely in a dungeon, much like Dark Reality, its biggest influence regarded worldbuilding rather than game design.

Fear & Hunger significantly inspired the approach behind shaping the world of Ombros and the status quo where Faceless finds himself, in particular regarding the portraying of cosmic and existential horror in a fresh way. Indeed, Dark Reality wanted to be a cosmic horror tale, even though we had to cut large portion of that content from the demo. Why?

Because as we were developing Dark Reality, we tried to imbue the game with hints and connections to the larger world where it takes place and to the themes of cosmic horror we wanted to be lingering over the player. Since the game is a demo for a larger project, we felt it was useful to build bridges to the bigger picture already.

However, we later realized that we were asking the game to carry too much information and narrative weight on its shoulders; the player would end up overwhelmed or, worse, confused. We ended up cutting many references to the world of Ombros and its impeding horrors, thus making most of the work inspired by Fear & Hunger invisible to the player.

In Conclusion

As it emerged from this analysis, there are two main flaws in our approach to the game references of Dark Reality.

The first flaw is that we wanted Dark Reality to follow too many creative directions at the same time: being immersive (like Silent Hill 2) while being a proper dungeon crawler (like Wizardry) while deconstructing the dungeon crawler genre itself ((like Spec Ops: The Line) while trasporting the player into a brand-new fantasy world ridden with a large cosmological turmoil (like Fear & Hunger). I could think of another couples of hidden creative goals we had set for ourselves but I believe this list is already wordy enough to give you an idea of our hubris.

The second flaw is that we didn't implement the dungeon crawler formula seriously enough, as we noted multiple times throughout this analysis. We thought that deconstructing a genre meant breaking the rules, and that probably stands true to a certain degrees; despite this, you need to have something to deconstruct in the first place, and Dark Reality doesn't function as a proper dungeon crawler well enough. I want to stress this a lot because we believe it is what limits Dark Reality from reaching its true potential at the moment.

For our next project, we will put great care in defining first and foremost what is the main reference and exactly what we want to take from it.

Thank you for reading!

- Luca

Release Date

Salty news for y'all: the Loan Shark is coming for payback on 8th August 2025!

Get ready for a fishing trip amidst water, debt, and blood.

If you really can’t wait, get your feet wet in the demo.

And after that, wishlist the game.

New Trailer

To celebrate the announcement of the release date, we put up an updated version of our trailer.

It shares the same structure and beats as the previous one, but showcases all the little tweaks we made to improve the look of the game.

Let us know what you think!

That’s all for now.

Happy Fishing!

Hello everyone!

Today I want to write a little about how Dark Reality came into existence. While the development of the game started around mid-September 2024, the seeds were planted many months before.

While I was still working as a narrative designer at an AA studio, I shared the room with this colleague of mine, Alessandro. Chatting during breaks, we discovered we both appreciated listening to video game ambience as we worked. Immediately, he shared with me this mix of King's Field 4 tracks:

In those days, I was playing Dark Souls for the first time and had gotten knee-deep into reading blog posts by game developer Kayin, incidentally a FromSoftware connoisseur who writes extensively about game design. She wrote a review of King's Field, which had already sparked my interest in the game even before Alessandro suggested the mix to me.

I got immediately hooked on the tracks. Their vibe was evocative enough to drench me in a mist of concentration, yet not too aggressive, or my thought process would end up overwhelmed. I used the mix (which amounts to about an hour) as a larger pomodoro timer, playing it over and over throughout the final weeks of my previous job. It was April.

Fast forward to June, I'm still listening to the mix almost every afternoon as I work on my personal projects. It has become routine by that point, and I can already recognize each track by the first seconds. I like the entire mix, but there is one track that I subconsciously look forward to as I work toward the end of the pomodoro. The title is Dark Reality.

Who would have expected that, huh?

It is such a haunting track, and it became even more meaningful to me when I finished Dark Souls and, a couple of weeks later, watched this video by YouTuber and dataminer Zullie the Witch. The background music is, of course, Dark Reality from King's Field 4, but the map explored by Zullie is the Ringed City from Dark Souls 3.

The blend of the decadent imagery of the Ringed City with the archaic vibe of Dark Reality; the ghostly perspective of the data miner's camera, freezing every moment of gameplay as if time itself had ceased to exist; the ruins of Anor Londo in the distance, no more a place, but a wound crystallized in time, forever lost in nothingness. I was touched by the video on a very emotional level.

"That's what I want to do," I said to myself. I wanted to make a game, to create a world that a player could inhabit—a world a player would suffer to see crumble to dust, just like I was affected by the distant sight of Anor Londo, where I had once fought and died and won.

I started taking notes in a small spiral notebook. They piled up until I had characters, a story, and themes—but the game was still missing. Then Nicola joined me, and the game took shape.

What follows is material for another devlog.

Thank you for reading!

- Luca

Today it's big catch day: the Loan Shark demo has been downloaded more than 1000 times.

We're also going strong with more than 400 wishlists in the bucket already. This huge increase in less than 15 days was due to Loan Shark participating in the Steam Fishing Fest, the release of the demo and a lot of content creators picking up and playing the demo.

We know we're still the smallest fish in the pond. And yet, it's motivating, exciting and even a little bit frightening to see how quickly you, the players, have started engaging with our game. Some of you even left reviews on the demo store page!

For all these reasons, we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts! We're working hard on polishing Loan Shark towards its release while integrating your feedback. Expect updates in the following weeks.

Happy fishing!

Studio Carota

And if you haven’t tried the demo yet, go play andf wishlist it.