Hey, game devs! Seth Coster of Butterscotch Shenanigans here to answer your questions about game jams, our studio, podcasting, and anything else you'd like to know about what we do, what we've done, or what we're going to do!

What is Butterscotch Shenanigans?

In January 2012, I participated in a game jam alongside my brother, and the game we made resulted in us getting hired by a local game studio in Saint Louis. Over the course of that year, we started participating in more game jams to learn more about rapid prototyping, and eventually we struck out on our own under the company name Butterscotch Shenanigans. Over time, our third brother also joined the studio, and today we have five core team members, plus an internal QA team and a range of business partners and contractors.

We built our game development ethos around the idea of rapid iteration, which emerged from our game jam roots. We don't do game design documents, and we don't spec out much more than a few weeks in advance in anything we do in our games. Instead, we create a high level vision for the game which is more of a "broad target", and then just iterate our way in that direction, adding or removing features and changing course as needed. This allows us to dramatically cut down the overhead created by long, extensive planning sessions, and has allowed us to make large, content-rich games with a fairly small team.

We also try to embrace the Dev Ops way of managing our work, so we build a lot of tools to smooth out our workflow and get rid of bottlenecks and human error. As such, we have a lot of homebrew robots that take care of things ranging from art implementation to deploying builds.

We used these methods to create Crashlands, which has sold over half a million units, and our currently-in-develpment game Levelhead, which is our own spin on the "platformer maker" genre and is currently chugging along in Steam Early Access (and will be for the foreseeable future). We are currently updating Levelhead on a bi-weekly patch schedule.

Our Podcast

We wanted to give back to the game dev community, because if it weren't for other people organizing game jams and showing us what we were capable of, we wouldn't have had the confidence to strike out on our own. So in 2015 we started a "game dev comedy" podcast called Coffee with Butterscotch, where we talk about life, business and working in the games industry. We keep it pretty high-level, covering a range of topics from industry news, personal motivation and productivity, team dynamics, and even just general life stuff like managing relationships.

Over the years we've grown our listener base to a few thousand regular listeners, and it has easily become one of the cornerstones of our studio's identity. It gives us a way to engage with other developers and our players more deeply and more personally than something like weekly blog post would.

The Shenanijam

As another branch of our giving back to the Game Dev community, we host our own game jam every year called the Butterscotch Shenanijam. Last year we had nearly 400 participants produce 117 games. This is a rated jam as well, which means participants can give feedback to other participants. Last year, those 117 games received 1,532 ratings, so the average game was reviewed 13 times, which is great!

We also take the 10 top-rated games from the jam and make our own little Let's Play video out of them, and it's always a good time. Here's the video from last year!

This year's Shenanijam starts July 12 (in two days), so I'm hoping to see ALL of you there! YES, ALL.

Any questions?

So, that's the basics! If there's anything you would like to know about our studio, our games, our design approach, the podcast, the Shenanijam, or WHATEVER, then let's do it!