Before there was a studio, there was a hay barn.
The name comes from a childhood on a farm: friends visiting, afternoons in the barn, and the irresistible urge to jump into the hay together. A little risk, a lot of play, and a memory that stayed.
The scene belongs to childhood. The feeling doesn’t.
A reason to make games
We want to make room for experiments. An idea might become a game, a useful tool, or a prototype that teaches us something before we move on. We want to follow that curiosity and see where it takes us.
Hayjump starts small: one person, some prototypes, and plenty of questions. We hope more people will become part of it over time. For now, there’s space to try things, change direction, and learn as we go.
We think of these early years as time to explore. There’s no fixed genre or audience to build everything around, and no rush to decide what every future project should be. What connects the work is curiosity and a set of values we want to keep returning to.
What we want to hold on to
Uniqueness. A game should have a reason to exist. We want to follow ideas that feel particular to the people making them.
Truth. We want to speak honestly about the work, including uncertainty, changed plans, and things that didn’t turn out as expected.
Meaning. The experience should matter to us, and we hope it will mean something to the people who play it.
Fun. Experimentation, surprise, and the pleasure of doing something just to see what happens are part of the point.
Community. That memory in the barn was a shared one. We want conversation and connection to be part of making games, too.
These are intentions we’ll have to put into practice. The useful part will be seeing what they mean when a design decision is difficult, a prototype changes direction, or someone sees something in the work that we missed.
The journal is part of the studio
We want this space to show more than announcements.
There will be room for prototypes and devlogs, monorepo setups and crates, releases and lessons learned. We also want to write about the work around development: marketing, developer meetups, Steam, game reviews through a developer’s eyes, and the conversations happening across the industry.
Some posts will be technical. Others will be personal observations or questions without a neat answer. Together, they should give you a better sense of how we think and what we care about.
If you’re a publisher, a potential collaborator, a fellow developer, or a player curious about the people behind a game, we hope you’ll find something worth spending time with.
This is the first note. There’s plenty left to make.