THE BIG NEWS: I wrote a subscriber-exclusive story for Fallen London, and it’s out now!!! Check it out!!!!

I’ve been sitting on this secret for the better part of a year! I’m really excited that I finally get to talk about it!!

The story’s called THE MIRROR HEIST, and it follows a pair of thieves attempting to steal a lost relic. You find yourself embroiled in this heist after a case of missing identity, and must untangle the mystery of the Doubt Street Phantoms…

That's right: 20% off! Two dollars off! $7.99! The normal price but smaller!

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell a stranger on the street! Whisper it in the ear of a lover! Watch that lover whisper it to a fish! Throw the fish back to sea as a warning! Let them warn the other fish of the tide of death to come! The tide of fishermen rising from the waters below! The moon pushes and pulls, as does the price of this video game! We are at a HIGH TIDE OF SAVINGS!

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Happy fishing,
Heather Flowers

(P.S. I’ve got a normal newsletter in the queue as well; there’s just been a lot happening in my personal life that wouldn’t make good newsletter fodder. Hope to have a regular update out soon!)

Hi everybody! Wow, what a week!

It’s been two and a half weeks? Huh. Anyways, what a week!

The FISH FEAR ME launch went really well! Um, really well. Like, “an order of magnitude better than anything else I’ve ever put out” well. We’re talking “six days on the New and Trending list on the front page of Steam” well.

It has a 20% launch discount, so check it out now!!!

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

And if you feel so inclined to leave a review, please do so!! The Steam algorithm is heavily based on how many reviews a game has: anything less than 10 won’t show up at all on Steam, so reaching that threshold swiftly is vital to a successful launch.

That’s all this time! I’ll have many more Thoughts once launch is complete. Right now I’m a buzz of nerves.

Wishlist it to get notified on launch:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Yeah that’s basically it. Game’s coming out soon! It’s good!! Please buy it on Friday!!! Maybe review it if you feel so inclined!!!!

Bye!!!!!

FISH FEAR ME comes out in exactly one week. If you haven’t wishlisted it, I recommend you do:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

There’s a lot I could talk about with this game, and a lot I will talk about. Today, though, I want to talk a little about the process of getting here.

It’s finally time!! FISH FEAR ME will be coming out in two weeks, and I am EXTREMELY excited.

MORE DETAILS:

• The game will be launching on February 21st for $9.99, with a 20% discount for the first two weeks (so $7.99 in practice).

• It features three maps, fifteen biomes, sixteen boats, thirty weapons, and 150ish fish to catch. If playtests are anything to go by, this results in somewhere around 30-60 hours of content for completionists.

• It ALSO features a storyline exploring the Fisherman’s cosmic debt. To resolve this debt, you’ll need to delve into the eldritch waters beneath the earth, learn arcane rituals, and slay the Leviathan before it consumes you.

• It’s about… five times larger than SNAKE FARM? At least. There’s a LOT of content here, including fourteen separate game-bending lures which augment builds and give access to special ultra-rare bounties.

• If the game launches well, I have plans for multiple free content expansions with new maps, boats, weapons, and more! The first content expansion will be called WOMEN WANT ME.

• I will be taking down the free demo when the game launches. This isn’t because I’m opposed to free demos, but because the demo will corrupt newer saves and completely erase 90% of your progress if you try to open it after opening the main game. There’s no way around this outside of completely remaking the demo, which I… do not have time to do.

• That being said, if you played the demo, the game should remember your progress when you start the full game, and unlock anything you would’ve unlocked at your current level of progression!

• I have genuinely no idea how this game came together so well. By all means, it shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is! But it is.

Hi y’all! To start off, I want to let you know about a Kickstarter that’s near and dear to my heart: Crucible of Aether! It’s an extremely crunchy Morrowind-inspired TTRPG about, among other things, a Victorian society built upon an eldritch landscape of living metal; a group of people trying to end death by removing people's souls; and Roman werewolves doing WWE opera. It’s already over 200% funded, and the next stretch goal is a short story written by Cohost’s own Jess Levine!

Check it out, it’s sick as hell!

Hey y’all! I’ve been working long and hard on FISH FEAR ME these past few weeks, and it’s time to start testing the new content out! This beta test includes:

• Two new maps (Shipwreck Bay; Shadow Sea)

• ~90 new fish

• Five new boats

• Like ten new weapons at this point

• Tons of weird secrets

• Inscrutable altars demanding sacrifice

• An area that just straight up kills you if you stay there for too long

• And more!

I’ve been putting a lot of work into making the game as big and weird and special as it can be, and your feedback is a huge part of making it all those things! Check it out!

HOW TO JOIN

Hi everyone! Wow, what a year! Right? What a year. What was your favorite part? Yeah, mine too.

It’s funny, writing a year-in-review post at this point in my life. This year has been extremely eventful, while also having very little I’m able to talk publicly about. I have my sights set on a publicly-exciting 2025, though, full of events that I can’t talk about yet but will hopefully be able to talk about once they happen!

So, what can I talk about? I can talk about snakes, goats, fish, wolves, and cockroaches.

SNAKES

It’s less than a dollar for the next week! That is SO little money!! You can get it for yourself, for less than the price of a soda in some hospital vending machines!!

Save 70% on SNAKE FARM on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about buying snakes, fighting them, selling their oil, and buying more snakes. Upgrade your weapons, get stronger snakes to fight, and chase down a high score with only ten days to live.

WOLFCLAW is a first-person eat-em-up game where you play as a werewolf ghost, killing/eating/possessing as many people as possible until your rampage is brought to a bloody end. We made it for the 7DFPS Jam, and it’s out now!

WOLFCLAW by Noé, Heather Flowers

A FIRST-PERSON EAT-EM-UP GAME

The primary thing I wanted to experiment with with this game was a nonstandard FPS camera, which is normally considered the “eyes” of the protagonist, but here it’s situated squarely in the main character’s mouth. This way, when you eat people, you actually get to see the whole thing happen! None of that Skyrim “you’re in 3rd person now” bullshit!

Hi y’all! I’m excited to report that I’m doing 7DFPS with my friend Noé!! We’re doing an ultra-gory game where you play as a werewolf ghost trying to kill/eat/possess as many people as possible before you’re eventually torn to shreds.

Technically 7DFPS starts in a few days, but we’ve got schedule conflicts for that week, so we’re doing it now. Anyways, some features we’ve got going on include:

• Moon-phase-based difficulty where your abilities are somewhat determined by the phase of the moon

• DOOM-style sprite billboarding (it looks very cool in motion)

• First-person eating-people-alive sequences

• Lock-on dashing

• Sick blood particle effects

Hey, y’all! I’ve been hard at work recently putting together the second area in FISH FEAR ME… Shipwreck Bay!

This area comes with:

• Five new regions

• One new weather condition (Ash Cloud)

• 40-50ish new fish

• A ton of weird opaque mechanics to discover

Hello. I recently ate a big soup. I ate the entire big soup. And now I am sleepy.

Hey y’all! It’s me, Heather Flowers. You know, from school? Let’s talk TABLETOP GAMES.

Specifically, Crucible of Aether! One of my favorite TTRPGs in development right now, it’s a mystic-industrial fantasy game with an extremely cool and evocative character creation/building system that continues throughout the entirety of play. It’s got its Kickstarter prelaunch page up now — give it a follow!

I’ve played several games of CoA so far (I’m running a campaign for it right now, actually) and it’s a system that churns out compelling characters with incredible grace. I recently made a war priest from a drumming-based blacksmithing religion who’s on a quest for redemption after a war tore his homeland apart. He’s learned how to use his magic smithing drum to heat metal in battle, but can he use it… to mend what was broken??

Howdy!

Steam Next Fest ended yesterday! It was a great experience, learned a lot, made a lot of connections, got lost once or twice, only threw up in a few people’s laps. Did you like this bit where I pretend like it’s a physical event? Yeah, me too. Basically it was like a normal week, except I was paralyzed against changing the game at all in case a terrifying game-breaking bug or design problem forced me to jump in with a new patch. Fortunately, this only happened twice!

The demo’s still out, by the way. I plan on leaving it up until the game’s ready, so you have plenty of time to try it out:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Hey y’all! I’m excited to announce that the demo for FISH FEAR ME is out now for Steam Next Fest!

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Please check it out! (And wishlist it if you like what you see!)

— Heather

Hey y’all. Welcome to the time of emails.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Nightjars recently — Modjeska¹ is an eternal favorite album of mine. It’s about (among other things) queerness, growing up with a thing-inside-you-that-you-can’t-ever-really-name, and leaving things behind whether you want to or not. It’s melancholy in a way that fits the present moment well. I really recommend checking it out:

NightjarsModjeska

Favorite tracks: Bird in the Nighttime, Genesis, Camp Pendleton.

Hey y’all! I’m extremely excited to report that the trailer for FISH FEAR ME is now live! Check it out!

And a request: because now is the time of emails, although you can share this on social media (which I certainly wouldn’t say no to), I ask instead that you send this video to just one person who you think might find it interesting and wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Start a conversation, y’know? It’s genuinely more valuable than posting about it.

My friend davemakes recently introduced me to the phrase “Year of the Cockroach”¹ when discussing the current status of indie games: that a bunch of the big institutions are collapsing or about to collapse or were simply never that good to begin with, and that the best way to survive the present moment is by being small and indestructible. The idea’s been stuck in my head: there’s no such thing as being too big to fail, but if you’re little and well-carapaced, maybe no amount of chaos can stop you. E3 is gone, long live a million smaller conferences. Twitter is gone, long live a million Twitter clones. Making a newsletter in response to a social media shutdown may itself be a bit of a Gregor Samsa move, but I promised myself that in according with the first rule of social media² I would never write another newsletter about writing a newsletter, so I’ll leave the topic for now. On to what I’ve been making with my prothoracic legs!

Last week, I posted a gif of a book animation I was working on. Now, let’s look at where that animation (and its twin) ended up!

Part of making a fully-fledged metaprogression roguelike is having lots of menus to store and display the player’s growth over time, and part of doing that properly is having cool animations and framing devices. Also I was in a pixel art mood — can you blame me? These turned out great.

Here’s the skinny: social media is dying and the new internet struggles to be born. Someday someone might make a site that’s worth joining again, but you probably won’t find me there on account of I’m no longer in my early 20s and completely lack the spirit to join another social media platform. I retreat with coziness and splendor to the land of email: a beautiful world of bits and bytes that’s old enough to have birthed me.

I am currently making this newsletter because Cohost is going offline, but to be perfectly honest I’ve found myself tiring of social media for a while. It’s nominally the “top of the funnel” for indie games, to borrow a marketing term, but in reality I’ve found much better luck just emailing YouTubers game keys and letting them do what they will. I’ll miss Cohost, just as I missed Twitter, just as I missed old Mastodon servers, just as I missed the halcyon days of the Spore creature browser. Remember Galactic Adventures? God that ruled.

Anyways, it's still useful and necessary to give people an easy way to keep abreast of the stuff I'm working on, and there's no sturdier way to do that than by just making a newsletter. I'm working on a website, too, but the newsletter comes first.

As thanks for joining this newsletter, check out this exclusive animation I’ve been working on for FISH FEAR ME: