First of all, to everyone who backed us on Kickstarter early on, invested in our company at the very beginning, played our games when they were still buggy, piloted our prototype:

THANK YOU

I just can’t say that enough.

If you have not seen our games lately, please take another look.

You can see just the tiniest fraction of the changes in Spirit Lake here. Between Spirit Lake, Fish Lake, Making Camp, Forgotten Trail and our in development game, Aztech, we have made thousands of bug fixes and enhancements.

When we first got started, we created a prototype that kids could play but it was very buggy. Then, we fixed almost all the bugs (never say “all” – a basic fact of programming is that there is always another bug). We created more games to teach more math. We collected data to show the games actually taught math and students’ math scores improved.

We then approached investors for funds to polish these games off to rival commercial games on the market. Many of these investors pointed out, accurately, that the educational content of our games should be more integrated with the game play, that the graphics needed to improve to compete with non-educational games.

We KNEW we could make really beautiful games that kids wanted to play but all of that takes money. The Catch-22 we found ourselves in was that before (most) angel investors would write a check they wanted to see the quality of games that cost the money we need from investors.

Amazingly, wonderfully, there were people who backed us on Kickstarter, who invested early on, who bought game licenses, and yes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture who awarded us Small Business Innovation Research grants … and now, here we are.

Spirit Lake: The Game has evolved.

Fish Lake is on Steam.

Looking at our latest releases, a good friend of mine commented,

Wow! I’ve always told people to buy your games because you’re my friend, but now I can actually look them in the eye and tell them these are great games and not feel like a liar.

Um, thanks. I guess?

Do you have a computer? Do you have a kid ? Put them together with Spirit Lake: The Game