We are two brothers from Ottawa, Ontario who love games and are filled with restless creative energy. We have the skills and passion to make the games that we’d like to play, so we founded SQYD.studio to share what we make with the world. While we are similar in many ways (we are both creative, emotional, we don’t like being told what to do, and we love our dogs) our differences are what makes us excellent creative partners.

Conor Rochon – Technical Lead

I’ve always been interested in games. I’ve been playing them as long as I can remember, and inventing them for about the same amount of time. I’ve played lots of tabletop RPGs and I have a special fondness for GM-less storytelling games (though I play them less than I’d like.) When I’m not gaming, I like to read.

I worked a wide variety of service and labor jobs while attending University. When I graduated, I wound up spending ten-years doing office admin in a chaotic small business environment. Now I want a small business of my own.

At SQYD.studio I’m in charge of implementation of our game systems by creating custom scripts and integrating them with the game engine and third party assets.

Joel Rochon – Artistic Lead

My brother, Joel, has an impeccable sense of aesthetics. He knows what looks good, he knows what sounds good, and he always has. Over the years, I’ve seen him pick up and quickly become proficient in many artistic pursuits form sculpting to film making.

Joel has worked for years as a professional illustrator. He’s an extrovert who is energized by the love and friendship in his life. Overall, he’s warm, generous, caring, and brilliant. He’s humble too (which is why he doesn’t get to write his own bio).

At SQYD.studio Joel is in charge of artistic direction. He puts together all our originals assets and curates our third-party assets. From modeling to sound design, Joel is in charge of making our games look good and feel satisfying to play.

Dev Principles

The creative process can be both liberating and all-consuming. Without clear boundaries it can be easy to overwork, which ultimately undermines imagination and innovation. As a company, as artists, and as family, we want to support a work environment that we can sustain over a long-term project. We want to enjoy the act of game development and balance it with the rest of our lives, because we feel that this is essential to creating the best games we can. 

Early in our creative partnership, we wanted to define some game development principles to help guide how we work together. We hope these principles will help us work better as a team and we hope sharing these principles helps you better understand our process as game developers. By setting clear expectations, for both ourselves and our players, we want to foster the ability to work on complex projects over a long-term with minimal crunch or burnout. 

We are committed to developing all our games guided by these three main principles:

1. Follow the Fun

Our number one goal is to make games that are fun to play. When we have fun with our game we want to take notice and be flexible in our design and bring those fun aspects of the game into focus. This is also true for the fun of the development process itself. We want to be challenged creatively during development, but not frustrated by goals that are out of reach. We aim to find a sweet spot where we are learning and growing, but not so far out of our comfort zone that we struggle to make meaningful progress.   

Playtesting is a very important part of “following the fun”. There have been lots of times where we feel we have a fun mechanic- but playtesters can’t access it for one reason or another. Watching people play and listening to their feedback really is the fastest way to find both the parts of the game that are fun now and know what parts that need more work (or need to be abandoned altogether). Fun comes in all sorts of flavors, but we believe most people know it when they see it. We will keep a keen eye on both the fun of the creative act and the player’s feedback. We will shape our games to best highlight what is fun about them.  

2. Input Based Goals

This simply means that we want to set goals based on things we can control. Game development is unpredictable- it’s hard to know in advance how long a feature will take to implement. We want our goals to be achievable so we can celebrate them. If we set goals that say “we want to implement y feature by x date” we may have to crunch to get it implemented in time, and even then we may fail. Even if we hit the deadline, the race to meet it can affect the quality of the implementation. We want the ability to put as much care as we need to into our craft.

If we set goals that say “we will spend x hours working on feature y”  we can always achieve that goal because it’s not dependent on output. We can celebrate our victory– and if the feature gets implemented it’s a nice bonus.

This means we won’t be setting hard deadlines for milestones. We understand that not everyone can get away with this kind of goal setting- but we think it will work for us. At  SQYD.studio we aim to be fully independent and self-funded. The only people we are accountable to are ourselves and our players. We don’t want to make promises we can’t deliver on, so we won’t. This way we can keep working on our games and deliver them to the people excited to play them, when they are ready to be played.

3. Empathy and Honest Communication

We are human people working on a game. We have faults and strengths, good days and bad. No one is productive every day, and that’s okay. We can’t excel by treating ourselves like machines, and self-care is never detrimental to great art.

We will need a community for our game to find success while remaining true to these principals. We don’t want to build that community by making promises we can’t keep, so we plan to build it with honest communication about the project and by listening with care to the players that choose to engage with our games.