Now that the Dverghold release is over and has gone quite well, I had time to reflect on the last few years, which were an absolute rollercoaster. Brace yourselves, this will be a bit of a blog post. In 2022, I decided to pursue commercial indie game development for a living and work on The Great Rebellion began. Soon however, I started getting sick more and more often, with constant fevers and feeling weak. For months the doctors couldn't really tell me what was wrong. Well, it turned out I had blood cancer - stage 4b lymphoma when I was diagnosed end of 2022 - this was devastating not just for me but for family, friends and team-members. My firstborn son was 2 years at the time. Nonetheless I kept going, the work actually helped me keep grounded in a way, I worked on the game in the hospital and during the entire chemotherapy...an unpleasant experience to say the least, with losing all hair was still the least of my worries. Eventually I went into remission - still am, let's hope it stays that way but things look good! I got "lucky" in the sense it turned out I had a very treatable variant of the cancer. I was of course often doubting myself and thinking, what am I even doing here, this is crazy - I am dead sick and trying to build up an indie company to make a living off, already one of the more brutal industries you can pick. Not just that, I also decided to make a politically incorrect game with a high risk of being deplatformed and attacked. Yeah, in hindsight, that was maybe not the most "reasonable" (or sane) thing to do ... Despite all this, we finally released the game in 2024 and, given it's a debut title with basically no budget, it did quite well: TGR eventually reached "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on Steam! After that, our small but growing team started work on multiple games which we announced in our "Kvltcast" last year ... one of them was Dverghold, originally intended as a mobile game. Another project was the port of The Great Rebellion to the Nintendo Switch - in a "sanitized" version - well, there's enoug info about that story on this account, but tl;dr: after greenlighting the game, Nintendo kicked us off their store without any real explanation one day before planned launch and after months of work, we stood there with empty hands. We were all quite devastated from this and for some time weren't sure how to continue from here. This coincided approximately with the birth of my second son - the most beautiful thing to happen in those years for sure! For a time, I didn't expect to ever have any more children and was afraid my first son would have to grow up as an only child, but thankfully that is not how the story went and he was gifted a wonderful sibling :) What was not so nice was of course the financial struggles the whole Nintendo thing threw us in, as a family with a newborn... So we decided to put all our effort into fleshing out Dverghold and making a "proper" Dungeon Crawler for PC out of the mobile game. We released the demo a few months later to very positive feedback. What followed were months of brutal crunch for our small team (in which, unfortunately I couldn't always spend as much time with the kids as I wanted but I'll make up for that now!) and eventually, the release of Dverghold's Early Access. What can I say, it surpassed all our expectations: we launched with almost 20k wishlists and sales are going great - and despite the game obviously being unfinished and having some rough edges still, reviews are quite enthusiastic and we stand at 97% positive currently. Dverghold is a game we absolutely poured our hearts and souls into to create a true dungeon crawling Fantasy experience like the ones we grew up with and that shaped us all, reigniting the flames that were lit in us back then when we played the classics... So yeah, it's been a wild ride to say the least, and this is very far from the end of the journey. Dverghold is planned to be in Early Access for approximately the next year and we have a lot planned...and of course there are the other games we are also still working on, stay tuned for news on those in the next months. There were many moments where I did think about just doing something else, where I wasn't sure how or if I can go on. There were literally moments where I had to look the possibility of dying and leaving my family behind... but we always kept on going, the vision of what we want to build always guiding us. Despite the various hardships, I wouldn't want to do anything else. I dreamt of making video games as a kid when I played on my older brother's Amiga 500 and I will never let go of that dream as long as I am physically capable of pursuing it, no matter what. Dverghold is out now on Steam for Early Access: store.steampowered.com/app/4…