February 2025 While industry trends continue to put returning to our original IP just out of reach, we are grateful for the co-dev opportunities keeping us going. Although we’re still aiming to return to our IP because it’s what brought us together initially, co-dev is a strong foundation that makes sustaining our team possible. Our ability to adapt in these trying times has left us reflecting. If our IP isn’t the core of Twin Suns, what is?
Through this experience, we’ve been able to see that how we work together is at the heart of Twin Suns and goes well beyond what we’re working on. For any studios out there going through the need to adapt, we’ve found that focusing on what we’ve been able to maintain and how we strive forward gives us resilience.
At Twin Suns Corp, everyone has a voice. We playtest daily, split across timezones as an international company with all team members working fully online from the West Coast and Midwest of the United States to Puerto Rico to Northern Canada to Singapore to Spain. Our focus always comes down to what’s onscreen. Although we use documentation as a tool to kick off ideas and track iteration, it’s secondary to what we experience day to day.
In a co-dev environment, we adapt quickly by using a cadence of one week or two week long sprints, depending on the context. When we need rapid idea generation, we hold grassroots sprints with strike teams based around pitches that anyone on the team can contribute. We invite flexibility and welcome team members to jump from strike team to strike team as needed.
This approach is in part sustainable because of having a company culture that’s not heavy on meetings. Traditionally, being on multiple strike teams can be very overwhelming due to communication needs. We mitigate this by holding recorded daily standups of no more than fifteen minutes and communicating in Slack in broader channels where all team members can see all interactions. Rather than siloing based on discipline or strike team, we emphasize building community.
Using this strategy does mean that each individual needs to be responsible for keeping an eye out for what interests them and balancing their workload. However, our leadership structure gives us more team members to reach out to as we emphasize putting health and wellbeing above all else. We promote cross-disciplinary leadership where any team member can reach out to any lead in any discipline as a check-in, while also being encouraged to communicate to their discipline Directors. By reducing formality and fostering community, we’ve built up a company culture that is, much like our development process, open and quickly iterated on as needed.
Although the projects we take on may change, the way we work and our willingness to grow carry us forward. Twin Suns Corp is defined by our people, our adaptability, and the trust we place in one another. Whether for co-dev or our own IP, we’ve built a studio that prioritizes collaboration, iteration, and a shared goal to create games with players in mind. Looking ahead, we’ll continue refining, not just the games we work on, but the way we create them—remaining true to the values that brought Twin Suns together to begin with.
Twin Suns Corp
Comments