Meet Portentum

For the last few posts I kept mentioning "an unannounced game" and telling you to stay tuned. This is that game.

It's called Portentum, and it's a deck-building auto battler starring cryptids. You collect a deck of monsters, roll and manipulate dice to fire off their abilities, and watch your team auto-battle round after round. It's coming to Steam.

Why this game, and why now

I'll be honest about where this came from, because that's the whole point of these posts.

We needed a game we could actually launch this year. It Was You is the game we really want to make, but it's far too big to tackle right now, and we're still a mostly part-time team. Portentum fits the bandwidth we have this year. It's the smaller step we needed to take before we can take on something the size of It Was You.

The hope is that Portentum does well enough to change our situation. If it does, we can finally start bringing the rest of the team full-time and put It Was You into full production. No pressure, right?

Why cryptids

Cryptids are what broke us out on Fortnite. Hunt Bigfoot was the game that took Snowfall from zero to something, and Hunt TRex followed right behind it. Ever since, we've had players asking us for more cryptid games. So we built one with all of them in it.

Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, Mothman, Nessie, the Chupacabra, and a long list of others are all in here as units you can collect and build around.

A raccoon named Jimothy

Every other cryptid in Portentum has spent centuries avoiding cameras. Jimothy walked into frame and let the whole internet watch.

Meet Jimothy. He's a real raccoon from the Ballard neighborhood here in Seattle, and in July 2026 he became the most famous animal on the internet. Someone filmed this unusually round little guy waddling down the street, it racked up over seven million views in a matter of days, and then came the memes, the merch, an entire subreddit that filled up with thousands of posts in a week, and "hot Jimothy summer" plastered all over the city. The Mariners even put him in a team hat. He's Seattle's unofficial mascot now.

Watching a raccoon take over my city while we were quietly sitting on a cryptid game of our own felt like a sign. So Jimothy is now a card in Portentum, and we moved our announcement up to go public while he's still having his moment. Is "we timed our game reveal around a viral raccoon" a real strategy? Absolutely not. But some of the best things that have ever happened to this studio started exactly like this, so we're leaning all the way in.

If you're here because of Jimothy, welcome. He's the newest name on a long roster of legends.

Balatro meets a card game

Our lead game designer, Matt, is a serious card game player and had wanted to make a card game for a long time. We started tinkering with one as a side project, and before we knew it the side project had quietly become the main project.

The dice came from me. I love Balatro, and manipulating dice felt like the same itch as manipulating your deck. So we mashed the two ideas together. You build a deck of cryptids, and dice drive the fight. Abilities key off what you roll, so a card might read "Deals 3 damage to a single enemy when dice sum is 7 or higher." Chasing the right rolls to make your deck sing is the heart of it.

The Balatro influence runs deeper than the dice, too. It's all over the music. Our composer Thomas sent me this one day and it lives in my head rent free:

Fun thing I did as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Balatro is that the Balatro music is all in 7/8 (time signature, aka how many beats per measure) and I realized that B-A-L-A-T-R-O has seven letters, so I wrote our theme in 9/8 (P-O-R-T-E-N-T-U-M). 😉

Built to launch in milliseconds

We're building Portentum in Defold, and it has been super developer-friendly. That counts for a lot when your team is small and everyone is doing three jobs at once.

But the thing we love most about Defold is the license. It's completely free, with no royalties, no revenue share, and no runtime fees, ever, and it's run by a non-profit foundation whose charter requires that it stay free forever. For a small studio like ours, an engine that will never take a cut of our work is a wonderful thing to build on.

One of Matt's biggest gripes is how long Hearthstone takes to launch on mobile. Fortnite is heavy on mobile too, and I'm convinced that weight quietly costs it players. We didn't want that to be us. Defold let us keep the whole thing extremely lean, to the point where the game launches in milliseconds.

Everything in Portentum is streamed, which is a big part of why it boots so fast. We want the gap between deciding to play and actually rolling dice to be as close to nothing as we can make it. Keeping it this lean now also means that when we do take Portentum beyond the desktop down the road, it'll already be ready to run well wherever it lands.

The free-to-play question

Free-to-play was one of the hardest calls we've made.

We landed on it because a couple of things lined up. For one, we want the barrier to trying Portentum to be as low as it can possibly be. Free means anyone can jump in, roll some dice, and find out if they like it without spending a cent. It also keeps our options open for later. Free-to-play is what lets us eventually bring Portentum to other platforms down the road, like Discord Activities, where a game you can drop straight into fits naturally. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about it. My biggest worry is that players will look at a free game with things to buy and assume pay-to-win.

We think about this constantly. There's a real tension between being a studio healthy enough to keep making games and being genuinely fair to players, and I don't think you get to pretend that tension doesn't exist. What I really hope is that players come to see the microtransactions as a way to support a game they love and keep it growing for years to come. We're going to keep working this out in the open, and I'd rather hear from you about it than guess.

Where it's at

It's playable, and honestly, we're having a blast with it.

The part that's surprised me most is the meta. Just when we're sure we've found the best deck, someone else on the team shows up with something that wrecks it. That loop has been happening internally with five of us. I cannot wait to see what it looks like with (hopefully) thousands of players pulling it apart and finding things we never would have.

And you won't have to wait for launch to jump in. We'll be at PAX West in Seattle from September 4 to 7 with Portentum on the show floor, so you can get your hands on it ahead of release. Come roll some dice with us. Fittingly, it's Jimothy's hometown.

Wishlist and come say hi

We don't have a launch date to share yet. It's coming.

If you want in early, the two best things you can do are wishlist Portentum on Steam and join our Discord. Wishlists genuinely help a small studio like ours at launch, and the Discord is where we'll be sharing builds, cryptids, and the occasional cursed test deck.

The whole team is beyond excited to invite you into the cryptid world of Portentum. Thanks for following along with us this far.