Posted by Evel on Sep 09, 2025
Woo! From 25 August to 29 August was Aldercone All-Hands, where the entire Aldercone crew held an asychronous meeting over matrix with a one-hour live meeting over Jitsi.
It was fabulous!
Here's a summary of what happened!
What we've done so far this year
Fun and awesome things!
- Alderwood Point - Play-in-browser chill meditative game about taking pictures of wildlife.
- I Have 1 Cat Tree (...but I have 500 cats) - A chill TTRPG based around drawing a cat tree.
- Wicked Flare Patreon! - Cute doggy photos and such!
- Aldercone has a Comradery! - Where you are reading right now!!!
- Phoneix's flash fiction, home is where the H.E.A.R.T is, was published in the Storytelling Collective's anthology, In A Flash Vol. 3!
We also joined three aid bundles. While the bundles are closed already, they can all still be supported! Please check them (and others!) out if you are able to support them monetarily and remember even a few dollars helps when we all chip in!
And do check out your local mutual aid groups as always, and what direct and indirect actions are happening for you to take part in the fight for Palestine, against I.C.E., and to help and protect us most vulnerable members of your communities. 🤎
Crips for esims for Gaza
This fund and group is an easy way for folks to send funds that are 100% used to buy esims, to keep Gazans connected as Israel tries to hide the genocide.
You can still contribute, via Crips for esims for Gaza's chuffed, or via the original esims project (donation to a GoFundMe or by directly purchasing esims)
TTRPGs for Palestine
This bundle's funds went to https://www.map.org.uk/.
There are many other groups to contribute monetarily to, here's just a few:
- https://www.pcrf.net/
- https://gazasunbirds.org/
- https://linktr.ee/fundsforgaza
- https://chuffed.org/project/113327-refaat-alareer-camp-the-sameer-project
- https://chuffed.org/project/hope-giving-circle
Game Devs of Color Expo
This extremely awesome all-online expo is by Game Devs of Color for Game Devs of Color. It includes speakers from all across the globe, allowing us to speak our truths from frank discussions of surviving white supremacy to how to run an indie game dev studio to showcasing all our amazing works!
Other awesome things!
- Heckin' Tech update/backup schedule happening for realz
- Heckin' Tech got its first GoToSocial hosting client!
Our big September plans!
September is a busy month for the Aldercones!
The annual Game Devs of Color Expo is the third week of September. An awesome, invigorating event by Game Devs of Color for Game Devs of Color!
And we will be doing a second big sprint on Cayenne M'Cormik! We have many plans (wink wink check out our previous post) to update the demo, as well as fixing some bugs we missed and fix all the new ones we'll inevitably create. ðŸ¤
and after September plans!
We have many ideas and plans!
Big project and Aldecone branches updates
We have plans to release an expansion/alternative ruleset to our popular TTRPG Creature Feature!
There is a big update to ManyNames in the works based on awesome feedback we have gotten, including usability improvements, more generators, and advanced features!
Also in the future look out for an album or two of music and "music", the completion of Corporeal Creations, and some new branches of Aldercone!
Why new branches? Because we are slightly going to reorganize our projects, at least in our minds as current domains will not be changing, to have Aldercone Studio be a a sort of publisher thing. Of course it's all very informal and bogpunk, afterall we are just making up things as we go along and are terrible at capitalism anyhow. (Probably Evel just really likes making logos and such!) Also it is tree themed so that's gotta be good.
So look forward to is our games being under a new name, and for a new arm of Aldercone to distribute ezines and eventually print zines!
heckIMP and P.I.K.App
And we'll be doing a fundraiser on Chuffed for our heckIMP and P.I.K.A. projects! This is our project that renames/rebrands Gnu Image Manipulation Program for anyone to make a rebrand and also our own rebrand, Photo and Image Kooker Application. With these funds we will be updating heckIMP to the latest GnuIMP build and then updating P.I.K.A., as well as releasing a Windows build and Linux build for P.I.K.A.!
Keep an eye on our fedi account and the hashtags #heckImp and #PIKApp for micro updates!
Wrap Up
It was definitely quite good to get us all together and figure out where we've been and where we're going. Two of us had little mini presentations which were interesting and also like a trip through history, both our own and those under similar (ish) situations. We ventured down the history of Cayenne M'Cormik and ManyNames, and learned a bit about AK Press, an anarchist collective book publisher and distributor!
It was great that we did most of it asychronously via chat, allowing everyone to do it at their own pace and letting conversations be revisited. Very disability friendly! We are def looking forward to holding our second one next year!