Setting up shop

This is the first entry, so a bit of scene-setting.

Podule is an independent game studio, working out of Australia on our (my) debut title, For the Common Wealth, a top-down tactical squad shooter built in a custom C engine. I’m a team of one, and have been work on this game for 5 years.

It’s been an absurdly long and winding path to get here. I started off making a cute retro game for retro platforms and have ended up making a sort of Cannon Fodder on steroids.

In making this game, I have made an example of how not to make a game. First of all, when I started, I barely knew what I was making. I was just making a 2D game engine in C without even fully understanding what game I was going to make. Eventually I started building a real game. A sort of cute RPG with a pretty serious story about childhood trauma. As it turns out, making a compelling game based on trauma is kind of hard and I took a few months off to really think about what I doing.

Around October 2025 I decided I just had to make the game I wanted to make, and that would have to be the game I loved more than any other as a young teen: Cannon Fodder. Mouse driven, sort of action, sort of tactical. Accessible gameplay, not too much of a learning curve.

Cannon Fodder founded the base mechanic, but Cannon Fodder has no real story, and I wanted my game to have a story. I decided to base the game in my home of Australia, using real places as levels, and tying the game to the world of Australia’s Tier One Special Forces: SASR.

With a game mechanic decided for me, a base for a real story, developing FTCW became significantly easier, with a real target to aim for, I was ready to build this game in anger, and no more just messing around with my engine.

More soon. Watch the intro on the home page, and check back here for the field notes.