Hi again all animals of this world and website! We’ve been pretty busy this past while. Lots to catch up on regarding a couple jam projects – including what may be our best game to date? – and of course exciting news on what’s peering over the horizon… And also news that’s secretly been in perfect view this whole time. Heh heh. I’m so happy and excited to tell you about these!!

The year started with us participating in this year’s Big Mode Game Jam, hosted by videogamedunkey. The theme of the jam was “power,” so of course our submission was The POW-er! There was only a week to get the game together, and with that time the three of us made what we think may be our best game so far? It’s contending for that title with Commonplace, which is pretty funny, since we put so much more time and effort and resources into it compared to The POW-er, heh heh. But sometimes the joy of a strong mechanical hook is more compelling than narrative, atmosphere, literary themes, nerdy shit like this (affectionate). I personally go back and forth on which I prefer more, but the fact that they’re even in the same conversation is an indication of how successfully we executed on our vision for The POW-er. At least, this is what I believe; please play both for yourself and see how you may feel about them.

The reason it came together so well is because we were working with tools Frankie had been developing in Godot over the past few years to streamline the design of our (still not yet officially announced!) upcoming full release, which is pretty funny for several reasons I’ll get into later in this update. At this point all three of us were familiar and comfortable with the workflow of these tools, so designing stages and implementing assets went more smoothly than any other project we had ever done. This allowed us to work efficiently and quickly, and most importantly iterate often.

We even had time to get a few rounds of playtesting in! With outside playtesters! So far this is the only project we’ve been able to do this with, and it shows. The inclusion of the somersault was a direct response to these playtests, for example, which wound up becoming massively foundational to the game’s structure. It makes me wonder how our other projects would have changed had we gotten more outside perspectives. Of course, it’s tricky when all our other projects were lightning-fast weekend jams and Commonplace, where its identity relies so strongly on being oblique and impenetrable. In a way, The POW-er was really the only game we’ve made so far that could have meaningfully been playtested at all. It is something we plan on prioritizing for future projects though, jams and full releases alike.

In any case, the optimized workflow and playtesting must have paid off, because we wound up winning the Powerful Premise Award! This was one of only eleven awards granted among 821 entries, and considering a majority of those eleven awards are jokingly tongue-in-cheek, we’re emphatically proud of earning one earnestly addressing the quality of the game’s design. Speaking candidly as The POW-er’s designer, this is the only time I’ve ever been formally recognized like this for my work ever, even including all the music and writing and anything else I’ve done. It’s profoundly validating in way I wasn’t really prepared for. Like maybe what I’m doing actually is pretty freaking good after all. Like maybe people aren’t just being nice to make for the sake of being nice, maybe this stuff is really worth doing. It may sound silly to have this sort of response to such a small achievement, but this is honestly how I feel. So, um, thank you video game donkey and more. I guess before this section on The POW-er closes out I also want to say: the barrels are genuinely the best enemy in the game, I don’t regret anything, and no I’m not joking…!!

Look, it's alien...!

More recently in August, we also joined this year’s GMTK Game Jam, marking the third time we’ve entered one of these. Our submission was STAR CATCHER: HEART MASTER, which has a ton of early drafts and sketches available to check out in our gallery. Most of the stories around STAR CATCHER’s development are shared in the descriptions of those gallery pieces, so to avoid redundancy I won’t touch much on that sort of stuff here. Go check out those gallery pieces and read the insights there! What I do want to share is how we went into this one recognizing how, up to now, all our jam projects tended to neglect menu design up to the last moment, which resulted in them being remarkably unpolished compared to the rest of the game. I believe a nice, intuitive, responsive, finely-crafted menu can really influence someone’s overall perception of a game, so this always kinda bothered me. To address this we brought in Commonplace environment designer Griffin to focus exclusively on the menus, which really did the game wonders. There’s a personality and a richness to STAR CATCHER’s menus that the three of us absolutely could not have accomplished on our own. Everyone please appreciate the great job he did!!

Unlike The POW-er, STAR CATCHER didn’t wind up accruing any sort of prizes or awards, but with 9,590 entries to the jam, this is to be expected. That’s 1068% larger than the Big Mode jam!! We did at least place within the top 50% of all the rating criteria though, most categories even landing within the top 25% – and the most common ratings we received were perfect 5 stars. So we may not have put out the jam’s overall favorite game, but those who played seemed to thoroughly enjoy it. This too is lovely and extremely validating. It’s really so amazing to see that players are connecting with the sorts of games we’re interested in making.

Pretty good showing from both titles.

The actual construction of STAR CATCHER was drastically different compared to The POW-er though, and it’s not just because of the unusual format the game is presented in (I like to call it Qix basketball – try to find one other game in the world similar to this!!). The truth is, quietly, secretly, Frankie has actually been building an entirely new game engine from scratch for the past year or so; this was our first time using it to complete a project front-to-end. And to good success if I can say so myself, and so I do!!

The biggest difference from Godot to this custom engine (I’ve been calling it Frengine, but not without the sense that Frankie might think that’s lame) is the lack of any graphic user interface at all. In Godot, Frankie set up all sorts of hooks which allowed Robin and I to control variables and values with simple buttons and sliders and the like. This is no longer the case; now all of us are in the code, which is a new environment for us to get used to. As always though, Frankie has done a phenomenal job of sanctioning off the parts of the code that are actually relevant to what Robin and I need to take care of, and structuring everything so that we can still mostly work using simple terms and not having to learn tons of syntax. Without Frankie, Robin and I really would just be a pair of scared and confused artists, so if you’ve ever enjoyed any of our games, please understand it’s only because Frankie makes them happen…!!

This new Frengine isn’t just for no reason though – during development of our upcoming full release, Frankie kept finding these pain points in Godot that for one reason or another made certain aspects of development tricky or annoying (I’m dumb as bricks and perfectly clueless on what these exactly are; Frankie has expressed interest in writing a blog post here further detailing the desire to create a new engine and what sorts of things it prioritizes, which I’d personally be fascinated to read). This means following The POW-er, we’ve ditched Godot entirely and have been adjusting our workflow to this new Frengine, which also means we’re essentially restarting development on our upcoming full release. When I alluded to something being funny about building The POW-er using these tools in Godot, this is what I meant; the purpose they were built for isn’t even being utilized in the end, and The POW-er is the only released game in our catalog that wound up using them at all, heh heh. I said, “heh heh.” It’s funny, isn’t it? Spending two years developing and working with tools we’re discarding entirely before they get to be used for their intended purpose…? Heh heh.

The truth is though that Frengine is still pretty sparse; we managed to get STAR CATCHER out without much fuss, but it’s still not completely ready to handle the scope of the project we’re working towards. So in the meantime we’re also working on something slightly smaller to catch Frengine up to our ambitions. Larger than a quick jam project, but not quite the size of Commonplace or this other project we’re building to. Sadly this means it’ll still be some time yet until you see the project I’ve been excited for since the launch of this site, but I hope you’ll trust me when I say it will be worth the wait. It really is the culmination of so much that I believe in. Patience will be rewarded, yours and mine both…!!!

You may have noticed we released two game jam projects this year, where in past years we’ve only done one or none at all. As we get more familiar with our tools and the process of working together, it’s becoming increasingly simple to just get together and bang out something cool real quick. It’s invigorating in a way. The POW-er in particular was a great exercise in working nose-to-grindstone for an extended period of time longer than just a single weekend, and gave us a delicious taste of how it feels to work on these projects long enough to give it the care and polish it needs. We really believe we made something special, and it was because we could devote ourselves to it so wholly for a meaningful amount of time. And the numbers don’t lie; check out this breakdown of all our games’ statistics. You’ll find Commonplace and The POW-er are far and away our most celebrated releases.

Our games' analytics as of October 15th, 2025.

Knowing that we’re capable of pumping out a game like The POW-er in such a short time frame has really gotten us interested in putting out smaller games more often. Formally structured jams like GMTK and Big Mode are easy to plan around since they’re more consistent annual events, but we’ve considered popping in for some sporadic smaller ones here and there as well. The simple fact is that we love making awesome games together and take any excuse to do it more, heh heh! So, don’t be surprised if we wind up having more to say about jam games going forward… But of course they’ll never take priority over these full releases we’re steadily chipping away at.

By the way, have you noticed the new “Contact” tab we have on our website? Since Pitter-Patter no longer has any official social media presence, we realized we’d still need some way for players to reach us. If you ever find yourself wanting to inform us of a bug in one of our games, or otherwise just wanting to express your thoughts about our work, please use that tab to send us your message. It’ll send an awesome object called “e-mail” to our “inbox” where we can “read” the “words” “you” “wrote.” And we can even write back if necessary. Personally, I think e-mails is such a lovely activity, and would love to hear from anyone who has anything to say. Don’t be shy!!!

I think that’s all for this time. As mentioned throughout the update, we really are so extremely proud of The POW-er and STAR CATCHER: HEART MASTER, so if you haven’t played them yet I hope this has convinced you to do so. In fact, as this post goes live, so too with an update to STAR CATCHER that will be releasing on not just Windows and Linux, but Mac as well! Now everyone can play!! So, I hope you will do so. We love these games so much and we make them for you to enjoy. Please taste this awesome love in our joysofts today and forever.

– Max