Ed: Hello, everybody! This is Eddie V. from Boss Rush Network, here at PAX West 2026! I am here at Snowfall Games, and they are debuting their first game, Portentum. I am here with one of Snowfall Games’ co-founders, Jaden Holladay!

Jayden: Hello! Thank you for this. I’m so eager to talk to you about Portentum.

Ed: Well, before we continue, I want to know how you actually got into video games, and how you got into game development? 

Jaden: I love that question. I started back in StarCraft 2 modding. I built a Marine Arena 2, which is still a top-ten mod on StarCraft. Then I built another one called Bio Defense: Zerg Outbreak. I was in high school at the time, and those two games made the top ten and had thousands of players. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

Ed: It’s really exciting when you have thousands of players playing your game. 

Jaden: Funny enough, I went on to get a formal degree in computer science,  learned some in games, worked at Amazon Games for some time before I finally said I wanted to start my own studio.  I co-founded this with my co-founder Austin, who’s my art director, and we started building a game in Unity in 2021.  I was kind of moonlighting while I built it. 

In 2024, I quit my job to do this full time. I said, “Let’s go find a publisher for this game. It was a bad time in the industry to quit your job. We talked to 30 publishers. We got one term sheet, and we turned it down. It was not a great term sheet. From there, we had no money, and we said, what are we going to do? We started throwing darts. What we mean by that is we would just say, hey, there’s Discord activities launching. Let’s build a Discord activity.

Then there was UEFN with Fortnite, and we said, let’s go build a game on Fortnite. Well, the Fortnite one really paid off. We built Hunt Bigfoot on Fortnite and had over, I don’t know, a couple million players play Hunt Bigfoot. From there, last year in 2025, we built fourteen games in Fortnite and have launched it with a team of five now. Have grown to the point where we said, okay, Fortnite is cool. Let’s build our first standalone game.

We needed to start smaller than the Unity project that we did in 2021, and we conceded about Portentum, and that’s where we’re at right now. This is our first standalone title. We have spent time in Fortnite. With Hunt Bigfoot, we had players coming to our Discord saying, “Can you make more cryptid-themed games?” That’s how Portentum became a player’s dream of bringing all the cryptids that they asked for into this game. 

Ed: Did you do console gaming as a kid? Were you into Nintendo or Sega Genesis?  Or were you just PC as a kid?

Jaden: I played on both. Some on console and some on PC. I think the first game I built was an action script in Flash way back on the web.  Which just doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s really fun to think back that far. 

Ed: That is such a throwback. I was thinking of Behemoth because Alien Hominid was Flash. You think of Cave Story as Flash. The use of Flash was the indie games of the time, but it was only on PC. I think for me, the first time that Flash came to console was Alien Hominid when it came to the GameCube. 

Jaden: Yeah, that’s right. The GameCube was such a legendary console too. I think I spent so much time there playing the GameCube. I miss it. So,  yeah. 

Ed: It’s on Switch 2, so…

Jaden: We’re reminiscing on some really great times in the games industry, right?  On that note, though, I really am excited for how Indies are really seeing a big comeback right now, and it’s exciting to be a part of that wave. We’re really excited by the feedback we’re receiving here at PAX and seeing what players think of Portentum. 

If I might go on a tangent here onto something, I want you to know that in the game, I think it’s really cool that we hired a composer locally here in Seattle to do the music. I said, “I want Balatro music, but with cryptid themes. If you know Balatro music, it’s like the synthy soundtrack that transitions from one track to the next without skipping a beat. Portentum is the same way, but we took it a bit further.

In battle, you have a strong orchestra with strings. While you’re in the collection section, you have a banjo just strumming, but there’s never a crossfade between the tracks. We just don’t skip a beat, and there are transition tracks from one to the next. The genres of the music change. You just don’t realize it, but it’s like this is the sound. This music fits this portion of the game. 

So you don’t have to wait for it to cut off. It doesn’t cut off for the next track. It just all moves seamlessly together.  We know that with Portentum, you’re going to be doing runs over and over, and you’re going to be hearing this music over and over. Balatro was so brilliant in how they did that with the synthwave kind of music that never gets old. It’s really just something you can listen to, and there’s plenty of 10-hour YouTube tracks. We wanted the same effect for Portentum’s music. It should be something that you could just turn on for 10 hours and lose yourself in. 

Ed: Can you explain the gameplay of Portentum? I see you have a demonstration ready to go.

Jaden: Your whole goal is to choose a deck. So this will be a deck that you have built before when you start a run. So this is like the collection screen. Yes. You’ll have selected a deck and you’ll have what you want in that deck, and then you’re going to go start your run action. So we’re going to select this deck and start a new run. So the goal is to win 10 rounds. You have five lives. It’s going to alternate between a shop and a battle. How familiar are you with Auto Battle?

Ed: I’m good at them. With this one, with the auto battle, I guess you select your cards, and then you hit auto battle, and it just goes against each other. 

Jaden: That’s right. Yes. So this is where we’re going to make the bulk of our decisions past the deck-building phase, right? So we have a shop, we have five coins, and we’re going to choose how to spend them. I’ll explain what’s going on. So I’m going to look at the points here, and this Mahamba deals two damage when the dice sum is five or higher. So in Portentum, we roll two six-sided dice. Sum it up, and that’s our dice value. So when that sum is five or higher, we’re gonna do two damage. This Mahama also heals itself for two when the dice sum is even, so it has another ability. It has eight health, it costs five coins, and this right here is what we call threat. It has eight threat.

Now threat in the game is an interesting mechanic. When two abilities need to run, say both of them say when Dyson was five or higher, we rolled six, there are two units with these abilities. You’re like, well, which one’s going first? The unit with the highest threat goes first. Similarly, when you’re dealing two damage and you’re trying to decide who you’re gonna target on the enemy team, it’s gonna attack the one with the highest threat first. So there’s a little bit of a trade-off on their threat, and that’s something you need to play to in your hand.

So, we’ll go ahead and just purchase the Mahamba. That’ll be my first trip to the main warband. I’m gonna head to battle. So we’re in a verse against Maddie. So Maddie here shows him the Golden Goose, which, if you look at it, the Golden Goose only has a healing ability, and then it has, in the next shop, it starts with two extra gold. So this is a healer and an economy-focused cryptid here. It’s actually not gonna do any damage, so basically, if I hit play here, we should win this round. Easy round. We get a free win. So we’re already up one. We have nine more to go.

Still have our five lives. So I just drew five more cards. Again, this is from our deck of 30. The draw pile here has twenty in it, so I can always see what’s up and coming. I can also see the discard pile.  Once we’ve shuffled through all thirty cards, we just reset the deck, and you get the same thirty cards to draw from again.  We have six coins now. Every round, we increment how many coins you have. I’m gonna look here. So I have a trooper copper that maybe is six. We also have a jackalope for three. I like the jackalope today. I’m gonna buy that. Now I have three coins, but I can’t afford any of these. I can go on one of these and say the Dullahan.

Now that’s a really cool legendary cryptid. It costs eight. I’m going to do that in the next round. I don’t have eight coins yet. I can right-click on it to lock it. Now, when I go to battle and come back, that Dullahan will still be in my hand. I can use a coin to draw, so I’m going to go ahead and do that. So I draw from my hand. That one stays locked, so I only draw four cards at this point. I’m not seeing anything I want there, so I’m gonna use another coin, and I’m gonna burn through all my coins because my coins don’t carry over from round to round.

I don’t think it’s gonna work for this. Let’s do the Amarok. So the Amarok has this ability where it deals three damage when the dice sum is between five and nine. It applies bleeding and frozen when it attacks. So we’ll maybe look at that next round when I can afford it. Let’s go to battle. Okay, we have the Jersey Devil that deals two damage to enemies when Dice of Masad, and we have the Vampire that deals two damage on every dice roll. It also applies to bleeding.

I’m gonna slow the game down for a second here. I’m gonna go to the dice roll so we can take a look at what happens here. We just rolled an eight. We did two damage to the Vampire. The Vampire strikes the Mahamba. The Mahamba is now bleeding. If we hover over it, it shows that it takes one damage per turn. So on the next dice roll, it’s gonna immediately take one damage every dice roll. Alright, roll again. We roll a gate again. The same thing’s gonna happen, except for now that Mahamba takes the damage, attacks first because its threat is the highest, and it actually heals itself because it’s even. That’s a great ability to have right now when you’re bleeding. The vampire strikes again.  Roll again. Eleven. Mahamba takes the damage. Takes out the vampire. The vampire has zero health. Its abilities don’t fire because it’s dead.

The Jersey Devil deals damage because it is caught. So Mahama’s at two, Jackalope’s at two, Jersey Devil’s at three. This is a close match. Mahama takes damage. Deals two to Jersey Devil. Jersey Devil does two to each and kills us and wipes us out. We lost our first life. That’s not the end, though. We lost one round, have four lives remaining. We continue.

So we have seven coins. We can get the Amarok now. That takes us to zero. We’ll just immediately go right back to battle.  So as you can see, we’re going to do this over and over in Portentum, and in the late end game you’re going to have five cryptids against five cryptids.  These little pips at the top, the star here, after I get copies from my deck, I can start dragging them on top to start leveling them up. So if I drag another copy on it, it will fill in a circle, and then another copy, so three copies,  will get me level two. At level two, the abilities of this cryptid level up to level two, and they unlock new special abilities. Two more copies, level three. Level three is the max. It’s important to know also that when you’re dragging and combining these cards,  you’re also increasing the health. It combines the health of the card.  

Ed: Yeah, when I was playing, I started seeing the stars. I’m like, okay, that might be the way that you get stronger, or the card is stronger. I thought it was five stars; I didn’t even see that it was a circle right there. I thought it was just five stars going there. Three is the highest.

Jaden: Yes, that’s definitely a piece of UI that I am trying to iterate on right now,

Ed: It is super small; even for me, I’m squinting to see that. 

Jaden: It is good feedback to hear that again, and keep thinking about how I can make that a little easier to read. 

Ed: I think you don’t need the circle part. If you just show the three stars, you can just fill them in there.  I think it takes away definitely when you have that yellow background, that little light yellow background. It’s hard to see the shape. It’s just a little too small. 

Jayden: That’s a good thought. I like that idea of the half-filled stars or something like that.  It’s a great idea. 

Ed: I was playing on standard, and it looked like I was winning. Then the computer started putting out legendary and epic cards just out of the blue. I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Is that how it was going to be? Does the difficulty ramp up at different times, or do you have to be very smart and have the right cards in your deck?

Jaden: So much to unpack here; that’s actually really exciting that you bring this up. So first off, who are you playing against? Well, it’s not actually the computer. You’re playing against a player’s warband that was created by another player and played previously to you, so when you go to battle, we snapshot the warband at that round, and then it joins the matchmaking pool. So you’re playing against other people who have come here to PAX and played this game.

Yeah, all players will have the same equal opportunity as you as far as coins, and they just chose differently in their deck building and then chose differently in their shop. So there’s like so much to the meta here on competing with other players and the deck building and outsmarting them and the meta that is evolving on the matchmaking pool, you know, ahead of the actual battle.

Ed: Is it like the ghost driving in Mario Kart? 

Jaden: In a sense. Very close to it. Yeah, that’s a great metaphor for it. So that people can understand, like you’re playing people who have played the game, but they’re leaving their cards or their play style, and you’re using that, not realizing it’s not the computer. No, it’s a player’s card. That’s right; it’s just that you’re still playing the game without them being in. That’s exactly it.  

Okay. Now, there is a game mode we call tournament mode. This is the standard that you’re playing; it is asynchronous tournament mode, but it puts you in real time. So you and your buddies can get into a party in the game of up to eight players and play only against each other. That’s when the mind games get crazy, right?

You might have a friend who has a deck that is manipulating the dice to roll high numbers, and your deck rolls low numbers. That’s when you’re trying to counter and outsmart and play the mind games of what cryptids are and what they’re doing with their decks, and how do you anticipate and counter them and have a deck that’s flexible enough to outsmart.  

Ed: How do you know when you lose? Do you gain anything from that loss? If you lose all ten rounds or you get a game over, is there some way to know that you still are progressive in the game?

Jaden: Yeah, absolutely. We have achievements, and we also have some meta progression. And when you lose your rounds, we’re playing against other players matchmaking-wise, and we’re competing your matchmaking ratings. So you might lose in your ten rounds, your five lives, but then still go up in rating because you just are playing really well against the warbands we’re placing you against. So yeah, both questions, absolutely.

Ed: Yeah, because I was just like, why am I getting destroyed? Because I just chose a deck. And I think the deck, it just felt like the deck was basic, of made. I didn’t make it well myself. It’s all the cards there. you start the game, or do you gain cards at the start, or make your purchases? 

Jaden: Yes, it’s going to be free to play. You will open card packs, but you can earn everything through playing. Okay. So you’ll earn gold bars when you play through the rounds, and then using those gold bars you can buy card packs that open them up and unlock things. You’ll also have achievements that you’re earning, and the achievements are very long-oriented, so you could have an achievement that’s like kill, you know, ten units, and then the next phase up is kill 20, and each phase is going to give you some fragments. Now fragments in the game are used as like a crafting material where you can go into the collection, a specific card you want and be able to craft that specific card.

Ed: So you’d be able to like give them additional abilities and anything like that? 

Jaden: No additional abilities; this is just purely for getting a copy of that card that you can then add to your deck.  

Ed: Alright, are there secret cars that you haven’t revealed yet that you may be thinking of in the future?  Like maybe, I want to say DLC packs or will there be you know, cars that you can actually buy and treat it as DLC?  

Jaden: There will be DLCs in the future.  I think I will reveal one to you. The others I’m going to keep a secret.

Ed: That’s fine. 

Jaden: I think this one’s the most obvious that players when they play they think cryptids and they’re like, where is Greek mythology? Nah, this is just going too far. Let it be like, if you go to Greek mythology, you could pull from a lot. That is deep.

Ed: Have you ever thought of making a comedic kind of deck? Like, what is the funniest thing that you could destroy somebody, but it’s like, let’s say full of clowns and witches and stuff like that. Just something so bizarre that nobody would ever expect. Have you ever thought of doing something like that?

Jayden: Oh yeah, absolutely. But I don’t know that I want to say much more than that.

Ed: No, because it’s just like, think when you have a serious game like this and you know, sometimes there are going to be players who be like, how can I make this funny? It’s just like not humiliating the other players, but make it challenging by using cars they thought would never be used.

Jaden: I like that. Yeah, that’s great.  I definitely want to find that. That’s something where we’re we kind of are thinking of portentous and we’re launching it as soon as we can this year in Q4.  We want to just get it in players’ hands, and then we’re going to be working on this content for years to come. This is a card game we hope just enters the zeitgeist and becomes something that everyone talks about and plays for the years to come.

We’re going to have DLC and explore new mechanics with players and interesting ways to add clowns or something.  I think one… maybe the tangent here for a second, but one aspect is like there’s kind of these real world creatures and cryptids that we’ve pulled from, but there’s also like kind of these digital cryptids that are now evolving and coming out and we could definitely explore some of that even. 

Ed: Do you think that this game could appear on console in a couple of years? Would you love to actually get this game also on console and maybe have cross-play with PC players and other console players?  

Jaden: Absolutely. There’s so much I want to do with this game. We built this game with performance in mind. Matt, our game designer, loves to play Hearthstone, but often complains about how long the boot time is on his phone. So going right out of the gate, Portentum launches in about under two seconds, and we are often playtesting it on the web, on Steam Deck, on Mac, on Linux, on Windows. Someday we’ll be testing on iOS,  Android, and consoles.  

This is a game we want to be everywhere, and we also want your meta progression to be able to carry on to any platform you choose to play. So I can say, I’m going to sit down on the console, and I’ll have my decks, my collection, and then, oh, I’m out on the go and open up my phone, and I have this same stuff that I’ve earned there. So we’re going to have this kind of cross-platform account linking system that will make all that possible. We want to make it really smooth.

Ed: When I started up, I entered the game. When I even got the cards and everything, once again, the transitions were so smooth; you don’t even notice the load times or anything.  I wonder, was that one of your goals during development for the game? To make it smooth so that players feel, after you make your decisions, It’s time to battle. Bam. Let’s go. Then the auto battle happens. Even that’s fast.  

Jaden: Yes, absolutely. It was part of our decision from day one. We came from Unity development early on, where our studio started. We went into Fortnite with Unreal Engine,  These are both heavy engines that take the game a long time to boot up, with a lot of bulk with them. So when we built Portentum, we went into it saying, “Okay, this is the game we want. What’s the game engine, and what’s the technology that’s going to fit best to launch fast and get players into the game,  without any barriers?” We found this engine called Defold, and the Defold Foundation is a non-profit that runs and maintains the engine.

The engine is super capable, and it has very friendly developer terms. So it’s an open source technology that we’re using that powers all of this under the hood. That was something we thought about from day one. I think that really came from Matt Floyd here, our game designer, who loves Hearthstone. His design space came from Hearthstone and Slay the Spire, and I think I brought the Balatro side of it, where I love Balatro. We said, “Okay, these are the things I like about these games. These are the things I don’t like about them.” We agreed that Brute Time was definitely high on the list of the things we don’t like about them. 

Ed: Well, I definitely got to ask: have you had any dreams that ended up in your game design? For example, you had a dream about the game, or something just came to mind. You woke up, you’re like, I’ve got to write this down or design it. Has that ever happened to you during development or even any members of the team? 

Jaden: Yeah, I think the dice manipulation was one of those things. So again, Matt had the concept of these 2D 6-sided dice that we’d roll, and abilities would fire, and that was really cool. Then I was playing Balatro, and remembered you can manipulate a deck of fifty-two cards, and you can change the suits or the numbers and rank of the cards.  I said, “Well, wait, what if we manipulate the dice?” So that’s where we have abilities that can manipulate the dice. Play with the rummages in some trash and take away three from the dice sum, changing the complete outcome of the battle. 

Then we took it a step further. We’re like, okay, dice manipulation is cool, but what if we have an ability that, when the dice roll even, it rerolls? So there are actually a few abilities encrypted in the game that,  when their abilities fire, it’ll just stop the play where it’s at, and it rerolls the dice.

Ed: I know some people are probably like, no! (we both laugh) In fact, that kind of leads to the playtest. Has the playtest been funny? Has it been upsetting? Has it been something that you guys, as a development team, just jumped into, and the outcomes are always different? That you guys even have good conversations and creative memories that way. 

Jaden: Yes. So there was this one time we added this unit with the ability; it’s called Doppelganger. Based on that, you might know what the ability does. It copies the ability of something or somebody else. In our playtest, that’s where placement matters in the game: we copy the ability, and I built a deck where I placed this one unit I thought was broken, and then I just bought four copies of the Doppelganger, and we played it out, and it just copied, copied, and copied. 

I found this completely broken strategy that seemed completely unbreakable, like no one could compete against it. We had to wipe that from the game because we were playing against our own matchmaker. We had to go take that warband and delete it from the database, and said this can’t happen, and then we had to fix the balance of the game because it was just so frustrating when you would encounter that. We’re just like, we can’t beat it. Which is good because there would have been somebody in the real world who actually, when the game released, did that.

Ed: I don’t know if breaking games during the playtest is a good thing or a bad thing, but it sounds like it was a good thing because you were able to fix it before the game came out and someone just literally took advantage of it.

Jaden: Yes. We want players to find combos of cryptids that break and feel like they break the game, but always be able to find another combo that can break that combo. You know, that’s where the combinations just really skyrocket. In a way, almost like a fighting game in a sense. When we sat down one night, we said, “Well, if we have thrity cards and you deal five and then you have five coins, what are the permutations and combinatorics that actually have the design space? How many decisions can the player actually make?”

At first, it was simple. You have five cards; you pick one, but then you have to also have to factor in the cost. It became complicated even on turn one about how to be able to pick a card and what options you had. From there, it just balloons. The combinations get so infinite for us so quickly that we won’t be surprised when players play and, on the meta, it just evolves to the point where there’s just this broken combo that no one can beat. At that point, we’re just going to be on a live service game where we’re going to say, “Okay, this is the meta, new patch is out, we’re gonna adjust the balance and redeploy and let everyone discover the next new meta.”

Ed: Well,l I only got two more questions for you. The first one is: I’m doing a project for Boss Rush called The Beauty of Video Games: Personal Interest, and it’s about games that personally mean something to you. It’s not just interesting; it has had an impact on your life, and you find so much beauty that others don’t find.

For example, for me, the game is Gris. If there are a lot of people who didn’t like Gris, my personal interest in it is that it’s an emotionally driven game that uses color and beautiful animation. It personally means something to me because not only am I into art and love art, but it’s talking about death and grieving, and it does it in an expressive and hopeful way. So that’s just an example. Is there something like a game for you or even a different kind of media that personally means something to you that others may not find beautiful? If they gave it a try, they would see that beauty that you see.

Jaden: I love this question, first off. This is magical. I hate to pick like a triple-A game because there are so many wonderful indies. Well, here’s the story to my answer. When I was really young, I’m talking elementary school, my dad would check me out of school to bring me to his work, and they would set up a LAN party for StarCraft . I played StarCraft as a kid with a bunch of adults, and that got me into games. I kind of, you know, stepped away from that and played, like, console games on GameCube and Xbox and stuff like that, and then I remember when I was in high school, I woke up in the middle of the night to come to get a drink of water and I passed my dad’s office in the house, and his light was on. 

I’m like, oh, he must be working late, and I walk into his office, and he has StarCraft II launched, and I didn’t know StarCraft II had launched at that point. I was a console player at the time. I go, “What is this game?” He’s like, “Do you remember StarCraft 1?”  “Yeah” He says, “Oh, this is StarCraft II.” It was about 3 AM. I was like, “Dad! Why are you up at 3 am playing StarCraft II?”  So I was mad at him for one for playing StarCraft II and then not telling me about it, and he snuck it in and just like kept playing it at night when I was asleep and beating the campaign before he knew I would find out, and then he would have to share the game with me.

So later that same day I got out of school, and I came right home, and I was like “It’s my turn.” I start playing StarCraft II, and then funny enough, that’s really where I discovered modding, and it got me into the games industry so it kind of completes the whole story here. StarCraft II is that game.

StarCraft and II, but mainly II, is just so influential for so many people. Definitely for PC players. I think the console player community was starving for that. They’d be like, why did the PC get it and we don’t? I think now, in the days that PC and console kind of share the same thing, definitely with Switch 2. A lot of PC games now could come to that console and play it. 

Ed: Yes, we do. Would that be something that you would even try? Like if it came to Switch 2? Would you pick up a Switch 2 and just want to see how it plays on that console?

Jaden: I’d be absolutely interested. I love the RTS genre. You know, I love what like Zero Space and some of these other ones are trying to do. It’s a hard genre to succeed in right now. I think we saw this big shift to MOBAs from the art like the modding community of the RTS genre, right? That’s where like, Dota really came from and as was modding Warcraft. So I really hope there’s like this really big wave that pushes back to RTS eventually because I really miss it.

In fact, I still, to this day, boot up StarCraft and just get my fingers moving and warm and love it. Trying it on console would be a lot of fun because I’d love to sit on a couch nowadays, and because of the joy cons being mouse control, you would get that feeling. 

Ed: My second question is: What is that go-to snack for you? Maybe it’s the weekend, and you’re ready to relax, and you just need something comforting. 

Jaden: I have a classic celery and then I buy this really nice honey roasted peanut butter and I throw some raisins on it. You know, it’s just such a classic. You know, semi-healthy but a refreshing snack that I go to often. When I’m really feeling like I need some comfort food, I’ll buy some yellow potatoes and mash them up and make some, like, loaded mashed potatoes with some, like, sour cream and cheese, and it’s just so good. It’ll put you to sleep. (We both laugh and agree)

Ed: Where could they learn more about Portentum, and where could they learn more about the company? 

Jaden: Portentum is on Steam, so the wishlist is there. We’re going to launch on Steam first, so we’ll come to Steam Deck, Mac, Linux, and Windows to start, and then we’ll look at expanding from there. You can go to Snowfall Games in your browser and find our website and where my dev blog is too, if you’re interested in following along for more of the story behind what we’re doing at Snowfall and our ups and downs throughout.  We’re a small team of just five right now. We are avoiding taking on investors. We just want to build a healthy little game studio for us creatives.  We’re just doing it by bootstrapping right now. So we’ll see how far we get. 

Ed: If, and it’s just a hypothetical, your game got picked to be in the Indie World Direct from Nintendo, what would be your response?

Jaden: Wow. Just that would be incredible. I could only dream of something like that, with how much work that my team has put into these kinds of projects and just how much I work and wake up every day just pushing as hard as I can because not only do I want to succeed, but I see everyone on my team and how much they want to succeed, and I think the biggest thing that comes to mind is how excited I would be to bring that news to them and tell them, hey everyone. We’re gonna be in, you know,  Nintendo Indie Direct. That would be just mind-blowing. 

Ed:  Do you have any plans after the release? Just like, are you planning a party? Are you planning a vacation? When the game releases,  where is your mindset? I really want to know what devs feel when their game is out into the public, into the world. 

Jaden: This is such a fun question for me right now because this is gonna, I’m gonna say that life goes on. The joke around the studio right now is that I’m having two kids. My wife is pregnant; I’m expecting in October, my first child. We’re also launching the game sometime this quarter, you know, in Q4 of this year.  So I’m, you know, I think around the time this game launches, I’m gonna be having a baby that I’m taking care of. That’s truly the indie spirit where, you know, these games are built by real creatives who have lives behind them and it goes on, but yeah, we’ll find a way to celebrate between all of that. It’s just such an exciting time to, as I say, have two kids. What we do, our team is kind of remote. We have two in Utah and three in Seattle, but in moments like this where we’re all together at PAX, we’re gonna go out after this and have a dinner and just celebrate the moment here. Then at launch, it’s kind of where we get to business. That’s when players are playing, and we want to make sure servers are online, and everyone’s having a good experience. 

Ed: Have you got a lot of positive feedback or any kind of feedback here at PAX West about the game?  Is this the first public demo, or do you guys actually have the game out that people can play and give you feedback?  

Jaden: This is the first time we’re putting it in people’s hands. It’s here at PAX West. It’s a little bit of an exclusive. You can’t play it anywhere else right now. So after this, we’re looking at Steam Next Fest in October. That’s when the first time that players at home will be able to boot up the demo.  Then after that, we’re looking at launch. Everything’s subject to change. It’s games, after all. But we’re looking like we’re on track to put this in players’ hands. We really want to do it as soon as we can.  

Ed: Thank you so much, Jayden, for this interview, everybody. Please go to Steam. Wishlist Portentum. Support this team.  Be on the lookout when they do drop the demo in October. Once the demo drops, get your hands on it and give this game a play. It’s super fun. It’s very challenging, but if you know how to strategize, you’re gonna have a great time. Thank you again, Jayden, for your time.

Jaden: It was my pleasure. This was so much fun.

You can wishlist the game on Steam. You can check out their website right here.

Featured Image: Snowfall Games