September 2026 Updates

Hey everyone!

It's been a wild year for sure. I haven't had much to write about game design recently and I definitely miss that. I'm starting to feel urges to write here again. While those posts may or may not be incubating, I thought I'd give an update with whatever else has been going on.

Subnautica 2 is out and our lawsuit has been resolved. I'm really proud of what the team has done with the game and I'm loving the community feedback, interaction and updates. This is the end of an absolutely huge and important chapter of my life. Unknown Worlds has been the most exciting and thrilling ride and I'm incredibly thankful for it. It's time to look forward, not back.

Christmas Movie

We've finished production of Nutmeg & Mistletoe. The lessons from producing a film could be a blog post of its own - but I'm not sure this is the place for it. Being on set was such a communal thrill, eating three meals a day together, solving non-stop problems and seeing a film come together scene by scene was a wonderful experience. I cannot wait to do it again. It was so different from making a game, and yet the multidisciplinary aspects of games felt like it prepared me for much of the work necessary to make a film.

I did some live audio blogging of the shoot, as well as some behind-the-scenes development and cast interviews on my film podcast here. I also recorded my thoughts at the end of every day of the shoot, which makes for a fun record of the daily ups and downs.

Now, actually selling and distributing a film is a whole other ball of wax. I've come to believe that the film world has some very broken business practices which have made it hard to make a profit and ultra-complex. Film "packaging", viewing windows, sales agents, gatekeepers and so much more make the future of independent film quite precarious and downright archaic. I could easily see this film losing money - it feels like the industry has its own cards stacked against it. More below

We're hoping you'll be able to watch the film this Christmas, but we don't have our distribution locked in yet. We're currently on Angel Studios in their "Guild" program if you'd like to get a preview and rate it.

New Game

A few months ago, I got inspired and started prototyping a new game. Project Hail Mary and Dungeon Crawler Carl got my creative juices moving in a whole new direction.

We started with Godot and I'm in love. It's absolutely amazing how far this engine has come and I already feel like I never want to go back to Unity. I remember having the same feeling when building the first Subnautica prototype in Unity. It was easy to choose because it was just a decision for the prototype, but within days it felt like the long-term engine decision had already been made.

It's amazing what a single designer and a programmer can prototype with Godot + Claude. It's fully command-line pilotable and testable, and the load times and execution speeds feel magical. We can try so many ideas with such blazing speed it's mind-blowing.

But prototyping with AI is a very different process than hand-coding everything and I'm not sure I love it all. You have to be very prescriptive and specific to make sure you actually design and control what you're making. Sometimes it just adds random crap to your game for you to discover and evaluate later. And we've found we need to be very careful about not adding new editors and systems just because we can. And I've found essentially zero utility in AI designing gameplay systems. Its results are so middling and generic that I've had to redo basically all of its design work from scratch.

I do find it very useful for design research though. Choosing a "lens" prompt to break down many adjacent relevant games gives incredibly valuable information quickly. Asking how 5 specific other games handle blueprints, ammo, weight or respawning saves hours of reading Wikipedia or downloading, installing and playing games. It also helps other people on your team get up to speed with all your competitors, as this design research can be checked in to your repository along with other relevant design documentation.

As we were looking for actors and putting together our production budget for Nutmeg & Mistletoe, it became more and more clear to me that the odds are stacked against independent filmmakers. It seems to me that independent film is utterly and totally unsustainable. The Netflixes of the world are a huge problem, but it's not just them. Independent games don't have this problem - what's the difference? My conclusion is that there is no fundamental difference. We just need a new way to find, watch and buy movies.

In January, I started prototyping a potential solution. It started off as "Steam for film" and that guided it for a very long time. Now it's morphed a bit into, into "fan-powered independent film". We break down the walls between film makers and the fans that love their work - you can participate in "AMAs", watch premieres, follow creators and send them email. When they put new work up, you get an email that so-and-so actor, director, writer, etc. was just credited in a new film and you can click to watch it.

There are integrated ratings, reviews and tags (just like Steam). There's high-quality streaming playback without ads. You pay a fair price for each movie ($5-15), and you can return movies that you don't like. And there are no gatekeepers - anyone can put their movie up for a small fee. And we will pay out ~80% of all revenue. Any solution other than this seems to me ultimately unsustainable for makers, or inferior for fans. The goal isn't for us to make money; it's to fix the problem with independent film.

It's not an easy thing to launch and grow, but we're taking the first step today: we're launching a horror/sci-fi/fantasy shorts festival to kickstart our user base and attract some great undiscovered talent. We'll be paying $200k to the winners of our festival so they can make their next film. And we'll be screening all the top shorts in the Mann's Chinese theater on October 29th. Film festivals will help us solve the cold start problem.

Join here if you want to watch the shorts online, vote for winners or attend the festival in person. Viva la revolucion!

That's it for now. I hope you're holding onto your seats during this wild time of change.

-Charlie
P.S. "How to prepare for the next decade" has helped my mental state a lot recently.