Hello, world, again

If you're reading this, then it's likely you've found the soft launch of Secrets. Welcome. It's not finished yet.

Here at RR&D we've worked with subscription approaches for a really long time. Before we were even a real company, Grant was writing games like Havoc Brigade and Goblin Quest with the support of backers on Patreon, who made it possible for him to take a side hobby and turn it into something much greater. Through this kind of support, he created more than 100 one-page games and made them all free: certified bangers like Honey Heist, sure, but also small, strange, experimental things that let him work through design problems in public, get real meta with it, and explore. Without this kind of support and this kind of approach, RR&D would be a much smaller, more insular, and crucially less weird studio.

Now, more than a decade later, we're starting to explore the possibility of doing more with subscriptions. Partly because, after doing 100 of his one-page games, Grant is moving in new design directions; partly because we have grown a lot, and it'd be nice for people who aren't Grant to have the same kinds of opportunities. But also because the world is changing. Social media is owned mostly by billionnaires, and global trade and open markets - the things that made our growth possible in the first place - are becoming harder, riskier and more stressful. One way to respond to that would be to cut down on the strangeness of what we do: stick to things that are tried and tested, obvious work that will make money, rather than trying to play and experiment and explore. And: we don't want to do that.

We're still going to try to make our games commercially successful, because that's what pays our wages and means our artists can eat. But we also want the space to explore and stay strange, to take risks and to fail. To achieve that, we need support that isn't tied to crowdfunding or to a product launch in distribution. We don't expect that Secrets will become the thing that pays our team, exclusively: we do hope it becomes a cushion that lets us take our time, get things wrong before we get them right, and do the kinds of work that keep us happy.

In return, we want to give you things. Free emails, sure, but also glimpses behind the scenes: big blog posts, concept art, information about the stuff that doesn't ever make it to the published page, a backstage view on our materials and our processes and our design thinking. Free games and ephemera from our experiments in physical space, too. And we want things back from you, if you're willing to give them: feedback, playtesting, opinions and stories about the games you've played and their impact on you and your world. We hope you want these things, but as you've found us at this moment, if you subscribe now, you'll also get to shape what we offer. This is, itself, an experiment. We hope you'll join us.