SYNTHERION
← All transmissions origins

Just ONE post about the developer

An in-game view labeled HAVEN VERSE: a glowing pale-blue spherical structure on the left tagged 'LANDING PAD 1, APPROACH TO DOCK' against a starfield, with a ship's cockpit HUD on the right showing six numbered hexagonal panels.

Okay, I promise you (and myself) that I'm not going to make these posts about me. Most of the me-stuff will come out gradually over the course of posting about actual developer things.

The theme of these posts might end up being "watch this guy who has no idea what he's doing stumble through development." Hopefully, it's more like "watch this guy learn how to make a truly awesome game." Either way... here's some stuff about the guy:

Career-attention-span

I'm not a career game developer. I had some mini experience coding before the LLM wave, but more on AI usage in another post. I've been creativity- and curiosity-driven my whole life, and I get extra lost in anything that involves building a system. Like, obsessively lost. Often to a fault but sometimes to great effect.

My short career-attention-span has made this next bit take multiple paragraphs. (Inhales deeply). I started in film and television, made this short film. Found I had more of a knack for writing books, did that for a while (my own scifi plus ghostwriting anything else for work). These are the ones that made it to the internet. I still ghostwrite from time to time.

Then I made a pretty big leap: Studied electrical engineering for four years, then switched to an engineering management masters program. That switch to engineering was the start of me accidentally becoming a "Serial thing-starter". I guess it's a period of growth, so the followthrough I had from finishing novels kinda evaporated. I had a calculus-teaching YouTube channel for a minute (not good, since removed). I've made several board games, learned embedded systems to build small GPS-guided vehicles, pitched two energy/tech startups that gained tiny amounts of traction before folding, taught a little math at the college freshman level.

Wrapped up in all of that are the obsessions I wouldn't call "productive." Building the perfect fleet in Elite Dangerous. Trying to move my apartment off the power grid using $0. Crafting a multiverse in Minecraft with my sister.

And now I find myself standing on the edge of earning a hard fought degree in a field that is going to have all its entry-level jobs eviscerated by AI.

I have tried a lot, and most of it leaping without looking, which is probably why some things don't work out. Some of it is built exclusively for friends to enjoy. If the dev logs were meant to be about me, you'd hear more about a board game I made called JT Free that lets me and some old friends defend our hometown from robots.

All of this to say: I've now accrued all of these seemingly unrelated skills that are turning out to be the perfect combo to make Syntherion. Storytelling and System Building.

An overhead view of the JT Free board game laid out on a virtual tabletop, showing a city map board with red and blue territory lines, dozens of resource tokens in pink and yellow, character cards along the edges, and a row of player ability cards across the bottom.
JT Free, in Tabletop Simulator. A love-letter board game for friends.

A love letter to a few things

Like I said, the game is a love letter to a few things. I spent a milli-forever as a kid playing a top-down shooter called Tyrian. Flashing forward a couple of decades, you can imagine I also went nuts for games like Elite Dangerous. Ship design, customization, optimization were always huge for me. But so is co-op play with friends, and games like Elite Dangerous aren't approachable, and definitely aren't for everyone. I'm striving for Syntherion to be the best of both worlds.

Synth before synthwave

Somewhere in there, I fell for the synth itself. John Carpenter did it first for me, but Big Black Delta was my true gateway drug for the instrument. Regrettably, it took me a long time after that to actually find synthwave as a genre.

With enough time, I went from that one artist to this growing playlist of mine:

Help me shape this thing

When my focus is on writing my own sci-fi books or building board games, as much as I enjoy building them, my favorite part is always playtesting and feedback sessions with friends. I'd like to emulate that process with a larger community for Syntherion. I never thought I'd be bold enough to launch my own public Discord server, but there it is. I hope you'll join and help me shape this thing.

I enjoy creating things "for me," but it's way more fulfilling to make them for others. ...when they actually like it.

Deep down, I'm still a writer at heart. Hence... dev log.

-Tim