One person. Slow, deep-systems titles. Quiet engines for long hours. Shipping when it's done.
The full-text version of the home page principles.
No daily login bonuses. No fear-of-missing-out timers. No premium currency you spend faster than you can earn it. You buy the game once. That's it. The game treats your time as the only thing it costs you, and the only resource it asks for.
No microtransactions, no battle passes, no cosmetics stores. If it ships in the build, it's in the build. Steam takes 30%. The rest funds the next game. That's the whole business.
No roadmaps. No 'coming soon' chips. If it isn't in version.json, it doesn't exist. When something is real, it has a build number and a patch note. Until then, it's not a feature, it's a hope.
Forty seconds. No voice-over.
A short manifesto about the work.
I work on goneIdle alone. Design, code, art direction, audio, marketing, support. This isn't a flex — it's a constraint. Every system has to be small enough that one person can hold it in their head, and every feature has to earn its keep against the next one.
That constraint shows up in the games. They are deep but narrow. They have a small number of mechanics that compose into a large number of moments. They run quietly in the background while you do something else, and the something else is part of the design — not a leak in it.
I ship in public — patches go out the door with notes, builds get version-tagged, bugs get fixed in days not quarters. The game telemetry is opt-in and opaque to me by default. What I learn about how people play, I learn from people who tell me.
The studio's job is to keep this going. Sell enough copies of the current game to fund the next one. Don't grow into a payroll that needs feeding. Don't take a publisher deal that requires a roadmap.
The longer version of the home page note.
Today I shipped v1.2.2 — a UI Scale fix one playtester flagged in the Dive view. It's the kind of bug you only notice once one player resizes the window past 110%. The whole patch is fifteen lines. Six weeks past launch and the game is still finding small ways to be wrong.
I keep being surprised by which bugs land in front of which players. None of them are in the parts I worried about. The transcend math, the boss pacing, the prestige loop — fine. The view that doesn't survive zoom — not fine. I think this is just what shipping looks like. The real test isn't 'is it bug-free at launch'; it's 'do you ship the fix the same week.'
The other thing I'm noticing: every patch is smaller than the last. v1.0 was the whole game. v1.1 was a feature. v1.2 was a polish pass. v1.2.2 was fifteen lines. That curve is the studio working as intended.
— Ethan