Game with Us
This is the first dev blog I've ever written, and honestly it's long overdue. I figured the best way to kick things off is to just tell you who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.
The team
Snowfall Games is currently five people. Two of us are full-time, and the other three moonlight after their day jobs. We also work with a few partner studios, composers, and other talented people we love collaborating with. There are of course, spouses, partners, friends, family, and many others who are and have helped us all along the way. It truly takes a village to build a game studio.
How it started
Austin and I go way back. We were friends as kids and would often find ourselves in the realm of creation. Some early memories include booting up Roller Coaster Tycoon to create our dream theme park and messing with the particle engine in the fireworks editor. Little did we know we were learning skills that would transfer pretty easily to a game engine.
Shoutout to those firework creators who inspired us.
We eventually found ourselves messing around in Unity, and one day during COVID, after we had grown up and gotten day jobs, we met back up and started dreaming this into reality.
It Was You
At the time Snowfall came together, Among Us was booming in popularity and COVID lockdown was just getting started. We loved playing Among Us and found the social deduction genre exciting. We started scheming and tinkering with our own social deduction multiplayer game, which became our project known as It Was You.
It's still in development. Six years later. I think people call that development hell, but to us it's been an awesome journey.
There is a lot to get into on why that is. As it so often goes, scope kept growing. Looking back, it's easy to see that we needed to learn a LOT about game engines. We were also moonlighting and figuring out how to run a business at the same time. It Was You is still being worked on today, but it's slow going because it's such a massive project. We're also migrating it to Unreal, which I'll leave for a blog post all its own.
We'll launch this game eventually, and we know it'll be awesome when we do.
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The publisher chase
At the beginning of 2024, I took a leap from my day job to go full-time with Snowfall and immediately began pitching publishers. (I'll be talking a year of pitching publishers in a separate blog post because it's a whole saga)
Our initial pitching went extremely well. We had a playable build of It Was You, a well designed and thought through pitch deck, and a core game loop that was solid. We had ongoing conversations with some really well known publishers that most indies only dreamt of even getting an intro call with. We felt extremely lucky.
2024 just happened to be a turning point of the games industry. Very quickly doors started closing. Soon after a door would close, we would unfortunately often see layoffs reported from the publisher. We did receive a few term sheets, but never got to the final signing. Believe it or not, we turned down some of them. The rough games climate gave publishers an opportunity to offer less-than-ideal terms to developers. Since I was the only one full-time, we weren't in a pinch to sell our souls. We were fortunate enough to be able to say no.
Reaching the end of our threads with publishing did, however, create tension in the team. It Was You was an ambitious game that needed more of our team full-time to be able to deliver. We decided that creativity would be needed to find our next natural stepping sotne, and we went into what we call "throwing darts mode". We started exploring opportunities and seeing what could work, and thats how we found ourselves building a Discord Activity, AstroTanks, and diving into UEFN.
The UEFN pivot
I attended Unreal Fest in the fall of 2025 and saw all these young developers doing this thing called UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite). It felt like a little safe haven that was flourishing in the midst of a crumbling games industry. I remember calling Austin while at the convention and he launched UEFN right then and there.
It only took us a week to get Hunt Bigfoot onto Fortnite.
It felt magical to go from an idea to a playable multiplayer game in a week. It was so freeing to not worry about servers, network code, building an art style from the ground up, and monetization thanks to Fortnite's engagement payout.
At first we felt it was too good to be true, and it actually kind of was. When we initially made the game public on Fortnite it was a dud. No players, no activity. About a month or two went by, and Austin would occasionally push a little update to add to it.
Then Fortnite added the first-person camera device, allowing you to add a first-person camera controller UEFN to games on Fortnite. More importantly, they also added a discovery category for games with that feature enabled. Austin jumped on it, dropped the device into Hunt Bigfoot, and pushed it up.
It took off. We peaked at about 36k concurrent players and even hit homebar on Fortnite.
We chased that momentum over the next year with Hunt TRex and then branched into several other categories. We've now shipped around 14 Fortnite maps. There's way more to say about our UEFN journey, so I'll save the full story for its own blog post.
Where things stand today
Fortnite has been genuinely good to us. The income from our maps took the team from zero to something, and it let us bring on another full-time teammate. Going from one full-timer to two doesn't sound like a lot on paper, but it changes what we're capable of shipping.
Then Fortnite changed their engagement payout formula in November 2025, and it hit us hard. It's also frankly tough to grow a Fortnite game, since paid marketing for Fortnite islands isn't allowed. Fortnite has shifted to prioritizing games with high retention mechanics, and rewarding creators who monetize via in-island transactions, which just doesn't work with our content on Fortnite. All the above limits how much control we have over our own growth, and it's a big part of why we're looking beyond Fortnite for what comes next. We'll still be tinkering with UEFN, but we can't solely rely on it anymore.
To sum it up: two of us full-time are living on fumes. We're pouring most of what we earn back into our next projects instead of paying ourselves properly. The long-term goal is to eventually bring the other three onto the team full-time. Moonlighting is really freaking hard, and this means most of the team gets energy in waves and it's just unpredictable. The games industry being in a tight spot right as we went to find a publisher sucked. We've watched friends all around us get laid off. I often laugh at the crazy timing of it all.
But we are okay! We have had a lot of success in this bad weather, we have a future we believe in and the Snowfall team is quite a tight family.
What's next
We're looking at launching games off of Fortnite to gain more control of our destiny. Right now that means an unannounced game that we will be launching on web, Discord Activities, Steam, iOS, and Android to start. The idea is to reach as many players as possible with this title. Stay tuned!
It Was You continues in the background, and it's going even better with Unreal. We're also still shipping on Fortnite when it makes sense.
I think if we can weather this time, we'll be on the up and up. The indie road is hard, the timing has been brutal, but we're still here and we're still building.
Thanks for reading. This is the start of us being more transparent about the journey. More dev blogs to come. If you read all of this I'd love to chat with you in our Discord.
Onwards,
Jaden
nanostorm
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