Cardboard Computer

Hi! I’m Jake Elliott and this is the home of Cardboard Computer, a new independent game studio. This site will feature posts about upcoming games, tutorials for the technologies we work with, and articles about other developers’ games that we’re thrilled about!

Cardboard computer is experimenting with a somewhat nontraditional organizational structure. I will be the only “employee,” and will work as a game developer (designer and programmer) on various projects with different collaborators (contractors or project-partners). I’m planning to be as transparent about this process as I can: its mechanics, its successes and its failures. So to start that off, I’d like to lay out a few goals that I have for Cardboard Computer and our games:

Develop non-violent games

I’m most excited about developing games that engage with themes of friendship, collaboration and community. There are already tons of games about war! I’m not opposed to the use of games to engage with serious subjects like war or violence, but I feel that there’s a lot of other territory to explore.

Release game code as open source

Free/Libre open source software has been a very important component of my life as a developer; I use open source software at every stage of my projects (Emacs, GIMP, Git, Firefox, Linux, etc). I’ve also learned a tremendous amount from reading other people’s code. So while I hope Cardboard Computer will grow to be a business and we will be selling games, we’re going to release the source code for these games under a very permissive open source license. The way we release this code will probably depend on the specific game and the conditions of its sale, but I’ll do my best to be transparent about that process too! I’m also excited about developing games “in public” on source code hosting platforms like GitHub.

Engage with the communities

I have a blogging schedule mapped out for this site that includes technical tutorials, and also articles about games by other developers. I hope that these tutorials and articles will help Cardboard Computer contribute to the various intersecting online communities that have formed around game development (which have been so valuable to me) and also keep us connected as an active part of the conversation.

OK!

I’ll have more details about Cardboard Computer’s first few games soon! To keep updated, you can follow us on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, or subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog!

Also I’d like to thank my friend jonCates for coming up with the name “cardboard computer” and my friend Jeremy Lowther for the awesome header illustration!