2024. Need I say more? Probably, yes – otherwise what a tiny blog…
It’s been a spectacular year for us at Glowmade, which feels like it’s practically flown by. As we break away from the studio for a nice holiday till the new year, we figured we’d take a moment to reflect back on all the milestones, growth and good times 2024 has given us!
The more, the merrier!
One of the things we love most about our team is that it’s constantly evolving, learning new skills, achieving bigger ideas, and blossoming into a real community within itself. A lot of this is down to the drive and creative passion of each Glowbug and the fact that the hive keeps gaining new members!
New people bring new perspectives, which broaden the horizons of everyone around them. Glowmade are so lucky to have gained a whopping 23 new team members in 2024, across all departments and levels of experience! It’s so lovely to see how we all interconnect and make room for each-other to grow. The Slack has also never been more alive, with a burgeoning hoard of emotes unique to us – all suitably chaotic, I assure you.
Fest is best…
Whilst gearing up to announce our game (a secret that was eating away at us inside) we wanted to hurl ourselves into activities that could still engage with our communities in ways that conveniently didn’t involve any NDAs or combat-fuelled meat sweats. A huge part of that was with Guildford.Games.
February’s GG Festival was its biggest yet, and Glowmade had such a brilliant time running our stand and connecting with the avid gamers and developers who came from high and low to spend a day at G-Live with us. We were oh-so-secretly gathering sign–ups for closed playtests at Glowmade HQ, and rocking some goooorgeous new merch all the while.
We even had three Glowbugs presenting panels: Daisy and Ahmed on harnessing transferable skills, and Lizzy on celebrating diversity in the industry. It’s ever-important to us that we have a strong and encouraging studio voice, both in our local Guildford dev community and across the wider games industry. We’re very proud to have a team that always volunteers for events and talks wherever they can, and we met many wonderful people in the process.
We seriously can’t wait for GG Fest 2025, and hope to take part in many more talks and keep uplifting our ever-growing industry where we can. Our founders (Jonny, Mike and Adam) will be hosting panels at the GG Dev Summit, so there’s even more to look forward to! Plus we can actually talk about King of Meat now, so you’d better believe our stand will be dressed to the nines!
The Meat of the Matter
Ah, yes – the elephant-sized steak in the room. Sizzled to perfection. Still slightly rare.
We finally announced King of Meat at Gamescom 2024, and had an utterly spectacular time. There were ups, there were downs, there was more stress in that single hour of Opening Night Live than I think any of us had felt in a whole lifetime, but our game was there – right there! – and out in the world at last. It was magical!
The true highlight was meeting all the Contenders coming through our booth to play, and seeing the carnage and cackles that were shared between so many new people. We even accrued a couple Austrian superfans – shoutout Jan and Angelika! – whose joy at whacking trolls repeatedly into the ether made our achey feet and anxieties melt away each time we saw them coming back for another match.
Since August, we’ve been hard at work to keep the game expanding and evolving, fixing bugs, writing new story arcs for players, designing weapons, dungeons – you name it! All because our next key milestone was the Closed Alpha, and we wanted all new and returning Contenders to have the best possible experience we could give ‘em!
As of writing this, the Alpha has only juuuust closed its doors, but it was a super fun 10 days for all of us. Much like Gamescom, it was pretty nerve-wracking to get our weird little meat-baby in players’ hands, but they took to it like exploding rubber ducks to suspiciously blood-coloured water.
That first day of seeing the Ironlaw Plaza populated with hundreds of people gave such an indescribable feeling of relief, excitement and hope. The team all have stories of matching up with newbies and going through dungeons together, and they’re so fun to hear. I felt like a mother hen watching her goblin children unleashed on a sweetshop for the first time, only really dipping in to get ‘em out of scrapes and not leave them in the dust. Within about five minutes, they’d started waiting for me at the end of rooms and doing little dances together. It was impossible not to grin my way through a whole hour or two of seeing people start to get it – and that was only day one!
2025 holds so much in store for development, and – though we all welcome the holiday season – we truly cannot wait to dive back in and sink our teeth into implementing everything we learned from you guys. It’s only up from here – and, as we learned in Create Mode, the skybox is the limit!
All that glitters…
“It’s the start of the award tour” – Dee Patel, Senior Producer (Bugfix & Chill, Episode 2)
In addition to the big February festival, the Guildford.Games Awards are a big part of our community calendar. A night to celebrate the achievements and growth of Guildford studios and their developers – and always deeply wholesome.
This year, Glowmade were honoured to be shortlisted for the Guildford.Games Outstanding Studio Culture Award, with seven of our incredible Glowbugs also nominated across the board – ranging from collaborative spirit, creative prowess, overcoming adversity, behind-the-scenes contributions and more. We’re so deeply thankful for everyone who nominated us and our team, both within and outside our studio – so here’s us thanking you again!
It can seem a tad paradoxical – awards for a studio still developing their game? – but this ain’t our first rodeo, and games are so much more than their final product! We’re a studio who put culture and collaboration first, and the hard work of all our staff day by day is worth as much recognition now as it will be when King of Meat is released. We’re very proud of our efforts, our team, and our place in Guildford’s historical game development landscape – and we’re glad the Guildford.Games team are too!
So you can imagine we’re even more proud to have taken home awards in three of the five categories we were shortlisted for:
– Nick Ferguson Unsung Hero Award: Fi Harvey
– Collaboration Award: Elizabeth Plant
– Outstanding Studio Culture Award: Glowmade
And that just about takes us to today. About a million other things happened – like the Art Jam, Play@Develop, charity cycle rides, mental health campaigns, interviews, parties, even launching our own podcast (catch Bugfix & Chill anywhere and everywhere 😉 ) – but if we touched on them all, we’d be here till January!
We achieved and learned so much from all we did, and the only thing to do now is thank you for being part of the Glowmade community as kick off our new studio slippers, and get some sweet sweet R&R before a brand new year. We’ll see ya then!
