It has been a wild year for us at International Hobo Ltd! Not only have we worked on twenty one different videogame projects in 2024 - a company record! - but we’ve helped ship some incredible games too.
Everything in that tableau above was released this year and is brilliant at what it does, but especial mention to Mino Games Dimensionals - a roguelike turn-based RPG that’s in early access on Steam right now, which seriously impressed us with it’s inventive design.
The End of Incubus
2024 also saw us finally complete our Kickstarter for Silk, after an astonishing journey of nearly six years, as we mentioned in the previous newsletter. This brings to an end our long-running Incubus programme, a pseudo-incubator that developed various lo-fi side projects including Twlight Tunnels and Scramble All Fighters!
During its seven years of operation, Incubus secured game credits and games industry jobs for a great many brilliant early-career folks we were thrilled to work with, both from our office on Portland Street in Manchester, and remotely. The same office building that Incubus was run from is now the headquarters of the brilliant Huey Games, who we are indebted to for all their support with Silk.
New Rates for 2025 Onwards
We also put our rates up this year for the first time since 2020, which sounds simple but it never works out that way in practice. An awful lot of calculation, projections, and meeting with our clients was required to set the next set of rates for design audits, narrative design, and scriptwriting. We’d been told many times in 2023 that we were ‘too cheap’, but getting the new rates into a sensible framework was not easy to achieve. The new rates launched in November, having been foreshadowed since May.
We hope that you have had a wonderful year in games wherever you are, and are looking forward to a magnificent 2025 too. Happy Winter Solstice, and may your festive season be playful!
Chris and the ihobo games team.