One year of the studio, and a Playtest

A year ago I started a studio. Tomorrow the first real playable build of our game goes out to anyone who asks for it. Those two sentences sit next to each other on the calendar and I still have not quite processed it.

One year

September 2025. I announced Krokanti Games on this blog after ten months of not writing anything, in a post where I basically said "I have been overwhelmed, here is what I have been building". A year later I am writing again, and the honest summary is: it has been hard.

Not dramatic. Hard in the boring way. Long weeks. Decisions taken with less information than you would like. Months where the most important work of the day was not making the game. Learning to run a company at the same time as learning to ship one.

But it has worked. Slowly, objective by objective. Steam page, Valencia Game City, the Hexagon Cup in Madrid, the EOI acceleration program, ENISA certifying us as an emerging company, winning the Demoday, the Padel World Summit, OWN Valencia. Written down like that it looks tidy. It did not feel tidy from inside.

The milestone I am proudest of is the one nobody posts about: the studio pays for itself. We are a self sufficient company, funding the development of Padel Rivals out of our own work. That is the thing that lets me keep making my own decisions instead of somebody else's.

The summer

August took us out of the studio twice with Omega World Games: Llosa de Ranes on the 19th, Castelló on the 22nd. Small, local, no press, no publishers. Just a PC, two chairs and whoever happened to walk past.

I spent both afternoons standing behind those chairs, saying nothing, watching. That is still my favourite part of this job. You learn more from thirty seconds of someone's face when they cannot find the right button than from a week of arguing about it internally.

The rest of the summer was development. A lot of it. Animations redone almost across the board, the ugly physics cases finally fixed, a full redesign of the menus and interfaces, the tutorial rebuilt from scratch, and both local split screen and casual online multiplayer built and beaten into shape. It is a different game from the one people played in July.

Tomorrow

On 1 September the Padel Rivals Playtest opens on Steam. Anyone can request access, and we approve in waves. Inside: tutorial, quick match against the AI, local split screen, and casual online.

This is the part I have been waiting for all year. Not the events, not the awards. Real players, at home, telling us what is wrong with the thing we have been staring at for twelve months. We will be updating it several times through September and October off the back of that.

Full details are in the Playtest announcement, and the studio's own one year recap is up too.

September

I have a fair few things lined up that I will be talking about and making public over the coming weeks. Some of it studio, some of it personal, some of it neither. I am not going to spoil any of it here, but this blog is going to be busier than it has been.

For now: one year down, the game about to be in real hands, and a lot of work still ahead.

If you want to help, the single most useful thing remains wishlisting Padel Rivals on Steam.

Back to work.