Developing Out Loud: Our First Year of Development
By Lucien Parsons, COO, Dragon Snacks Games
I joined Dragon Snacks Games as fractional COO the month after Jen, Chris, and Michelle formed the company. My job is to do the unglamorous work of building the company scaffolding that empowers talented people to do their best work, which makes me incredibly proud of what the team has done.
The version of Project FarHaven that we showed at Gamescom in August 2025 was a prototype of our full game experience. The software demonstrated our concept and showed the direction we were heading, but it was not yet a game that could be handed to players and expected to hold together.
Since Gamescom, with feedback from our early players and investors, we have been building the pre-alpha that we released to our Discord playtesters in March.
Fun First, Pretty Later
The most important decision we made in this early phase of development was sequencing. We built gameplay systems first and deferred content production until the systems underneath were stable and fun. Deferring content requires a discipline that is hard to maintain, because the pretty parts of the game are genuinely pretty, and Project FarHaven is going to be a gorgeous game. But appearances don't matter if the game isn't fun to play. So we tested attacks without animations, we harvested lilacs from grey boxes, and we regularly made fun of the designer-art axe that looked exactly like the sword.
Our Chief Creative Officer, Michelle Menard, organizes our design work around three specific player types: the Explorer, who wants a traditional role-playing combat and adventure experience; the Creator, who wants to build, decorate, and influence the world; and the Storyteller, who wants NPC relationships, lore, and deep narrative to explore. Every system we prioritized, every feature we cut or deferred, ran through the filter of which player type or types it served.
We are now nearly gameplay systems complete. Two major systems remain: farming and in-game player mail. Everything else, crafting, combat, procedural adventures, town decorating, NPC relationships, player jobs and progression, trading and selling, home ownership, and even a real-time collaborative texture painter, is in and playable. The core loop, which we describe as Explore, Craft, Build, Befriend, is fully interconnected. When you go on an adventure, you come back with materials that feed crafting, which feeds town building, which deepens NPC relationships, which unlocks new jobs, which changes how you play.
All of these systems work together to deliver the core promise we are making to our players: when you contribute to the world, you really do help everyone in the game. That promise only holds at a certain scale. In a massively multiplayer game, individual contributions dissolve into the noise of thousands of concurrent players. Project FarHaven is built around shared worlds where players control who is in the game with them, which is what makes the contribution feel real.
Our new version supports up to sixteen simultaneous players with distributed host multiplayer and cross-play across PC, Mac, and Steam Deck. Someone starts a game, invites their friends through Steam or Discord, and anyone invited can play whenever they like. You can play at the same time or not, but everything you do contributes to the world you are exploring and building together.
Doing the RIGHT Things for Our Players, Not Everything
With only eight full-time employees, there is no redundancy. With two artists, three programmers, and two designers, plus our Chief Executive Officer Jen MacLean leading strategy and business development, we cannot let the project drift. There are so many things you can do when making a game. The hard part is limiting yourself so that you can get the game development done.
Our player personas give us a framework for prioritizing what we bring to our players. Our players then tell us which features they still want to see, what isn't resonating yet, and, hopefully, when we get it just right. We gave players access to the prototype right after Gamescom because feedback from players is worth more than internal confidence. What we learned from those early sessions shaped critical decisions for the past six months and will continue to do so throughout development. Prioritization is critical for any game, especially at our team size.
As Chief Operating Officer, part of my job is making sure our players' voices are heard. Developing Out Loud means we are asking questions early, when the answers can still change things.
Inside our Discord, you will find a quickstart guide to the game, regular survey questions, a FAQ, a dedicated playtest channel, and a way to report bugs. Our team is in the Discord every day. If something is not working, we want to know before we build more on top of it.
If you play the pre-alpha, tell us what you think. We are listening.
Join the playtest at https://farhaven.firstlook.gg
Join the community at https://discord.gg/Njx6SSqN