Welcome My name is Joni and I've worked on games such as duck detective. joni teamportrait circle This is a place for me to share my thoughts and ex...
Now that we’re into production on our 4th commercial title, I’m having a lot of fun working on it. But it took far longer to reach full production than we expected, and I’ve been trying to reflect on why. I think one of the biggest contributing factors was not taking a break between projects. Counterintuitively, we had to start later, to end up finishing earlier. I’ve had a lot of people tell me…
Preamble It’s been a few months now since the second Duck Detective adventure, The Ghost of Glamping released back in May 2025. We started working on this sequel before the first game “Secret Salami” came out. Without even knowing if the original game would be successful, we placed all our game shaped eggs into the duck shaped basket. I think the data was already there to suggest it was a sound…
I wanted to collect my thoughts on the narrative style at Happy Broccoli Games. It’s something that has been fermenting for the last few years, but never put down to paper or pixel. Since we’re wrapping up on the second Duck Detective and looking to the future, I realised it would be nice to write the unwritten rules we’ve grown so accustomed to. The main thing I want to focus on is choices in…
My favourite game in 2024 was Stray . The game was actually released in 2022, but after playing it for the first time this September I just can't get it out of my head. I really did not enjoy the first 60 minutes of the game. For some reason, the opening cutscene of the game included clipping cats and an invisible protagonist leading to hilarious imagery in what probably should've been quite a…
It's been only 4 days since we announced a 2nd episode of Duck Detective and I want to share some data and thoughts Our announcement strategy mirrored exactly to last year's plan with the 1st game . A world premiere of the trailer and game announcement in the Wholesome Snack Showcase (part of the greater Game Awards December announcement frenzy). The main difference was that we were much more…
Hello, My team and I are about to release our game Duck Detective on this Thursday 23rd May, and I wanted to share with you all the process of announcing to releasing a game in a 6 month time period This is me procrastinating from doing real work because I’m nervous 🥲 The TL;DR: We timed all our big announcements with events People really really love ducks TikTok converts surprisingly well Here…
2 years ago in August 2019 we had less than 300 wishlists. Now we have over 30k wishlists, here are some tips: Set up your steam page as soon as you can Start gathering wishlists as early as you can for as long as you can. Post consistently about your game At first we would get no upvotes or likes on our posts, but this number slowly grows over time. Don't worry if that's the case - if you get…
This was a comment I wrote in response to: What was the first game you launched on Steam and how did it do? **1.**Game: I was part of a team that created Ord. , a tiny text adventure released at the beginning of June: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079000/Ord/ **2.**Success or Failure: We failed to do the launch correctly, but I (personally) still consider the game launch a success. What did…