nobody asked for a game where cows flee a burning farm to become pirates. nobody asked for a troll city, or a game-show parody resurrected from the grave of my first dead product, or a christmas guessing game built on a plane. nobody asked, and that's the entire point. if you understand that sentence you already understand houseboat studios, the two-person game company Al and i run off a boat, and you can skip to the end. everyone else, come meet the cows.

it started at the voice-games startup, at the hackathons, which were very much my drug: a whole company hands you two days and says make whatever. one spring i didn't even make software, i carved a walrus out of soapstone, two around-the-clock days of stone dust and mania, a cool fucking statue. my immediate next ambition, written down in earnest: a somewhat cartoonish bust of a cow head, might go on ahead and order that marble. note the cow arriving in the record early, unexplained. another hackathon produced trollilopolis, a game about trolls that people genuinely liked, and something clicked in me watching coworkers laugh at a thing i had made for no reason. the no-reason was the active ingredient. and one thanksgiving flight home in 2023 I taught myself react native somewhere over the rockies and started a repo called heifferopolistogo. gonna make me a game, i wrote. a man alone in a middle seat.

so, the catalog. hold my calls.

trollilopolis, the flagship, live on its own dot-com. it has database persistence and daily players, and i will confess the most loyal daily player is a small robot i built, an automated test player that visits every day (partly to check the game, partly to keep the free-tier databases from falling asleep). the first game in history whose most devoted fan is employed by the developer. it never misses a day. i respect it enormously.

what are you?, built across a whole winter of ferry-ride sketching. when i went to buy the domain i fat-fingered the keys and bought the typo, whateareyou dot com, an extra e sitting in there like a stowaway. i kept it. correcting it felt like lying about a child. the typo is canon now. the typo is family.

the price is nice, which is a resurrection story. the first product i ever worked on in software, my whole apprenticeship, was a price-guessing game show for smart speakers, and in august of 2022 it got shut down. the price was in fact wrong, i wrote in my journal. there was a ferry worker who recognized me and used to shout game-show bits at me on the commute anyway, and when i assured him i had already spayed my cats and dogs he seemed disappointed. you don't get closure like that and just move on, do you? so years later i rebuilt the thing myself, as parody, alive again on the open web where no platform can sunset it. you can kill my game but you cannot kill my game.

freakgpt, about which the journal entry says everything: loool bought the domain for real money on a friday and sicked the robots on it. live by monday. later i hid it behind a konami code on this very blog (up up down down left right left right), because a secret door makes any house better.

heifferopolis, the crown jewel. cows flee a burning farm and take to the seas. we must take to the seas, and pray that the gods there are more gentle... or at least less cruel! narrated by a cow named stamps, who has the husky dark voice of a man who has seen too much, parked exactly between apathy and optimism. the hero cow is named al. is allison, lol, say the design notes, and the scholarship holds. and here is where my two lives fused into one absurd beast: heifferopolis is becoming an actual sailing school. a real ASA basic-keelboat curriculum wearing a cow costume, points of sail taught as cow rituals, knot practice rebranded as calf-tying, badges stacking up toward pilot of the pasture, a cow working her way across six hundred nautical miles of cartoon ocean while teaching you (the human) to actually sail. i was studying for my own sailing certifications at the time. apparently my subconscious refuses to learn anything without first converting it into livestock.

and the christmas game: december 19th, on the flight to miami for christmas with al's fambambly, i tried to slap together a holiday guessing game for her family to play on the television, coding against the descent, hoping to ship before the landing gear. that's the studio's whole soul in one image, a man in seat 23c sweating a deploy so his in-laws can have a dumb thing to laugh at together.

there's a hub now, houseboatstudios.com, the whole ragged fleet tied up on one page like our dock: trolls, cows, freaks, prices, typos. al is the studio's other half in every real way: first player, best namer, the laugh i am actually building for. no market research has ever been conducted. no roadmap exists. the entire product process is one of us saying wouldn't it be funny if, and the other one saying yes.

and why? since a grown man ships joke games nobody asked for and society would like an explanation: making things is the point. not the making of useful things, not the making of profitable things, the making itself, same reason a kid dams a creek. all day I do serious work with these tools, real stakes, real rigor, and i love it, but joy needs a workshop too, and a joke game is joy with a deploy pipeline. every one of these is a little wooden boat i built and shoved off the dock to see if it floats. most float! that still amazes me every time.

and one of them, remember, is a cow sailing six hundred nautical miles on a real curriculum, and you'd be right to ask why the cow is learning that. the cow is going where we're going. last chapter's next.