Hello, traveler. Step carefully — you’re backstage now.

Who We Are

We’re Known Fiction Games, a tiny independent studio founded in 2025 with a simple, stubborn belief:

The soul of a great game lives not just in its code or its art, but in the tension between developers and their audience.

We are here to build games together.

Not by tossing you the keys and disappearing. Though, honestly, that would be easier. Instead, we’re trying to create spaces where:

  • Feedback isn’t just accepted. It’s encouraged.
  • Ideas aren’t merely tolerated. They’re essential.
  • You help set the course for what actually matters.

We believe (perhaps against better judgment) that building alongside you will make our games better than anything we could have managed alone.

This blog, our so-called backstage, is where you can peek behind the scenes, shake your head at the mess, and, if you’re feeling generous, toss a cup of water on the dumpster fire before settling back to watch the chaos unfold.

What You’ll Find Here

  • Technical deep dives — Late-night musings on design and the many small disasters involved in building games from scratch.
  • Think pieces — Occasionally we climb onto a soapbox. It would be nice if you read them, but honestly, a polite nod is enough.
  • Early design notes — Half-formed ideas, rough sketches, and other artifacts that will almost certainly never make it to a shipping build.
  • Technical guides — Since we’re writing them for ourselves anyway, we might as well share the suffering.

Our Model of Co-Creation

At Known Fiction, we’re trying something a bit stupid on purpose: a fully public, structured way to co-create games. It’s basically organized chaos, where the community throws out ideas and we try to build them all, carefully managing everyone’s inevitable disappointment when ideals meet the reality of limited time, money, and brain cells.

The basic flow:

Plan → Idea Pool → Selection → Voting → Development

Here’s how the dance goes:

1. Project Conceptualization

First, we huddle in darkened rooms and brainstorm the initial directions for new projects. No goats are sacrificed. Yet.

2. Co-Creation Input Phase

This is the wild playground where ideas are born.

Co-Creators (that’s you) can:

  • Submit wild ideas
  • Comment and discuss
  • Argue politely with our developers (or less politely, we have thick skin)

Developers will also:

  • Toss ideas into the ring
  • Flag promising ideas for possible implementation

3. Idea Selection

Now comes the gentle pruning (read: ruthless reality check).

  • We sift through ideas and shape them into structured plans.
  • Everyone who helped bring a winning idea to life is enshrined in our Hall of Credits.
  • The refined ideas go into the Co-Creator Backlog.

4. Voting

Now it’s your time to shine (and vote).

  • Co-Creators who are also Supporters get a limited number of votes each month.
  • You can distribute your votes however your heart desires across the Co-Creator Backlog.
  • More votes = higher priority.

5. Technical Backlog

The mulch where dreams grow and occasionally rot.

This is the internal backlog where we stash all the essential but less glamorous work.

You don’t need to worry about it. Just know it’s there, like plumbing: vital, possibly neglected, and certainly leaking

6. Development

We work in small, focused bursts called sprints. That’s industry speak for “we think we can finish this in three weeks” — and we are always wrong.

In each sprint we want to include:

  • A fixed percentage of co-creator-driven tasks
  • The rest from the Developer and Technical Backlogs

7. Celebration!

Every cycle, we take a moment to thank the co-creators who helped shape what’s next.

We know you didn’t have to show up — and the fact that you did help us a lot.

Then we get back to it.

Maybe inviting the public to help make a game will end up looking a lot like the infinite monkeys and typewriters situation.

We are willing to bet the studio that it won’t. Here’s hoping it leads somewhere interesting without breadlines.

If that sounds tolerable, you are in the right place.

Welcome to Known Fiction.

“Every work of art is an unfinished thing. It breathes because it remains open.”