Where We Are, and How We Got Here

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

As of 2026, the 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 helping and have helped us all along the way. It truly takes a village to build a game studio.

The Snowfall Games team at GDC — Here is a throwback to the Snowfall crew at GDC in 2024.

How it started

Austin and I go way back. We were friends as kids and would often find ourselves in the realm of creation. For example, every Halloween we used to trick out our parents garage into a neighborhood spook alley, and every year the scope would increase. We'd drive around the valley picking up refridgerator boxes, slicing them up to craft a maze of walls through the garage. Branches trimmed from the trees that were set out for collection became props to create forests.

It was like stepping into a dark ride in Disneyland. Austin had a bit of a upbringing that exposed him to hardware, so at one point we even added pressure pads that when stepped on a garden hose would spray you in the face, all carefully hidden behind the guise of a large spider prop.

Jaden and Austin in front of their spook alley as kids — Check out these baby faces! I'm sure Austin will be targeting me first in our next round of It Was You for sharing this..

For the other less exciting months of the year, we'd launch Roller Coaster Tycoon to create our dream theme park and mess with the particle engine in the fireworks editor. Little did we know our we were learning skills that would transfer directly to a game engine. In a way I guess you could call Roller Coaster Tycoon our first game engine.

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.

Six years later and it's still in development. 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 with game development, scope kept growing. Looking back, it's easy to see that we needed to learn a lot about building games.

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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.

An very early build where trying to drop an item caused the player to "vomit" flashlights.

The publisher chase

At the start of 2024 I quit my day job at Amazon Games and went full-time with Snowfall. My project had just been canned, and most of my team had been laid off. I was one of a few survivors, and my reward was a transfer into tax and accounting automation. I actually envied the people who had walked out with severance. My partner was willing to carry our household income while I took the swing. I had a playable build of It Was You, and I figured I could build the rest on the way. It felt like the right moment to make the leap.

I spent the first few weeks after quitting putting together a pitch deck and seeing how far my network could take me, and for a while it really worked. We had ongoing conversations with publishers that most indies only dream of getting an intro call with. I flew to DICE in Las Vegas and stood in the casino hallway introducing myself to anyone who would slow down long enough to shake my hand. I learned quickly just how small the games industry is, and its full of passionate people who, when you approach with humility and curiousity, want to see you succeed.

A slide from our It Was You pitch deck showing the social deduction market opportunity on Twitch — A slide from our pitch deck.

Then 2024 turned into the peak of the games industry freefall.

The video game industry experienced mass layoffs in a wave which began in 2022, peaked in January 2024. An estimated 45,000 jobs were lost from 2022 to July 2025.

Doors started closing, and a few weeks after each rejection we'd often see the same publisher announce layoffs.

We did receive a few term sheets, and we turned every one of them down. One publisher, who never even played the game, offered us 90/10 until they recouped 1x, 80/20 until 2x, 70/30 until 3x, and 50/50 in perpetuity after that. I still think about that sheet. The rough climate was giving publishers cover to offer terms that would have made It Was You theirs, not ours. Because I was the only one full-time, we weren't in a pinch to sell our souls, and that was its own kind of luck.

Every publisher thread eventually ran out. It Was You needed more of the team full-time to actually ship, and it became clear a publisher wasn't in the cards. I write about all the gritty details of talking with publishers in another post, The Year We Chased Publishers.

We did the only thing left and went into what we started calling "throwing darts mode." Anything that could get us a win fast was on the table. We built a Discord Activity called AstroTanks, and we started building some games for Fortnite.

The UEFN pivot

In the fall of 2024 I went to Unreal Fest in Seattle. It was in my backyard, so I went alone.

I walked up to the UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) booth and asked the Epic rep what the whole thing was actually about, and whether there was any real money in it. They didn't flinch at the question. They pointed across the floor at a huddle of kids, some in high school and some in college, and told me to go ask them myself.

One of them pulled up Fortnite.gg and walked me through the engagement payout estimates for the top UEFN creators. The numbers were six and seven figures.

I called Austin from the convention floor, caught him at home, and before I finished explaining what I had seen he had UEFN open on his screen.

A week later, Hunt Bigfoot was live on Fortnite. We didn't have to build a server, write a line of netcode, or source a single art asset. Fortnite handled all of that, and the engagement payout handled monetization. My brain melted at how fast we could take a game from concept to launch.

The only real issue is that, well, nobody played it. Nothing happened. A month or two passed, and Austin kept pushing small updates anyway.

On a Friday afternoon in early January, Austin casually dropped yet another update and po in our Discord:

Austin Discord message on January 3rd 2025: "Just updated Hunt Bigfoot to First Person. It's WAY more difficult now lol. Go give it a try and let me know what you think haha" — Just Austin, deciding to try a thing on a Friday.

On December 11th, Fortnite had rolled out an experimental first-person camera device for UEFN and Creative. More importantly for us, they spun up a discovery row for games that used it and Austin saw an opportunity.

Four days later, it took off on a Tuesday.

Austin saw it first. He's the kind of developer who stays up late world building. At 2 AM on January 7th, he dropped a screenshot into our Discord with three words: "top 100 map rn." 639 players. Ranked #97 in the world. For a game that had been a dud for months, that was the first real sign.

Then he passed out.

Austin's Discord ping at 2 AM showing Hunt Bigfoot at 639 players ranked #97 — Austin's 2 AM ping. The first sign.

The rest of us woke up to the ping. By the time we pulled up the dashboard, the number was already climbing too fast to believe.

7:36 AM: 2,764 players
9:54 AM: 4,500
10:05 AM: 5,000
11:16 AM: #3 on the Homebar

Every refresh jumped the count by another couple thousand. A TikTok we'd posted weeks earlier suddenly had comments rolling in. Someone found a streamer on Twitch playing it live. Austin was awake again. The five of us piled into a Discord voice channel called the Bigfoot Lounge and just sat there together, watching the number climb.

I'd felt this exact high once before, back as a kid modding StarCraft 2 and watching strangers pile into Marine Arena 2 in the arcade lobby. I'd been alone in my bedroom then, at 2 AM, waiting for the next custom game to fill. This time I was in the Bigfoot Lounge with my team, and the number kept going up, and nobody wanted to leave the call.

Austin's reaction in Discord at 11:16 AM reading 'Number 3 Homebar, OMG OMG OMG, going up by 100s rn, this is crazy, we are almost at 9k, we are live in the Bigfoot Lounge' with a hype Pikachu reaction gif — Austin, nine hours later, from inside the Bigfoot Lounge.

Hunt Bigfoot peaked at 36,471 concurrent players.

Hunt Bigfoot concurrent player count graph showing a spike to 36,471 players — The view from fortnite.gg a few days later.

Hunt Bigfoot wasn't a one-off. We shipped Hunt TRex next, then branched into new categories. Around 14 maps later, 800 million impressions and 8 million plays and Snowfall was off the ground. I go deeper into our year in UEFN year in its own post.

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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

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