Hi and welcome to our newsletter! We’re Soft Chaos, a worker-owned game design cooperative that creates critically-engaged, intimate, vulnerable, and unique interactive experiences. Our work includes experimental videogames, tabletop games, larps, art installations, and interactive performances.
13
Total supporters
$45
per month
Posted by squinky on Mar 11, 2026
Hey folks! We started drafting this post back in January and now it's the middle of March, which, uh, should definitely give you an idea as to how the start of 2026 has been going. Better late than never, though? At least we're still alive and kicking.SQUINKYI'm not going to sugar coat it: 2025 was ... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Nov 21, 2025
Hey there, I wanted to let you all know about a cool new project that Soft Chaos has helped put together: the Trans Games Zine!From the About page: The Trans Games Zine is a community-based platform to promote hybrid games scholarship and game development by and for transgender, nonbinary, and gende... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Sep 09, 2025
Hello, Comradery Supporters!Soft Chaos coming at you with another update from our journey with Strangers on the ‘Net. With our Gamefound campaign launch getting closer and closer, we wanted to share a couple of updatesUPDATE ONE: PODCAST APPEARANCEWe were lucky enough to be featured guests on ... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Sep 03, 2025
Hello lovely Soft Chaos supporters! We have a short but exciting announcement: we have created a Soft Chaos Community Server on Discord.Why are we doing this?Reason one: We hope that this community will be a way for us to connect with people and help them connect with each other. Soft Chaos is kicki... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jul 21, 2025
This week in our interview series, we've again reached out to one of our early playtesters. Elissa not only played in our early playtests but also facilitated the game at a national theatre festival! Read this interview about their time with Strangers on the 'Net.Be sure to follow our Gamefound... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jul 14, 2025
Hello everyone! To give you a deeper and more intimate look into Strangers on the ‘Net we’ve put together a series of interviews with past players. Our first interview is with Willa– a player from one of our earliest playtests in 2020. She ended up being able to use her time with S... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jul 04, 2025
Over the course of our crowdfunfing campaign, Soft Chaos will be putting a fair amount of work into creating cool stuff about Stranger on the 'Net: interviews with past participants, podcasts, stories, and articles. We thought it would be fun to share all these moments of the past with you too! So h... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jun 27, 2025
WE ARE CROWDFUNDING STRANGERS ON THE 'NET! If you remember the early days of the pandemic, you might recall that Soft Chaos was commissioned to create an interactive theatre piece for the UpintheAir eVolver festival. That's how Strangers on the 'Net came into existence. Here's what it's all about... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Jun 13, 2025
Squinky here again! For the past little while, I've been collaborating with my friend Zoyander Street on their Intrapology project, which is a queer online interactive theatre piece about alien anthropologists dealing with a fragmenting multiverse. The Soft Chaos team has been running worldbuilding... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jun 04, 2025
We here at Soft Chaos have some important questions for you! Do you happen to be in the Twin Cities August 22-24? Have you ever wanted to Larp as the ghosts of a Fleetwood Mac-esque band on a purgatorial tour bus?If you answered yes to both of these questions, boy do we have a great surprise for... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Apr 10, 2025
Last month, Jess and I went to San Francisco for the 2025 Game Developers Conference and gave a talk at the Independent Games Summit, along with Comradery's own Ty Underwood, titled Funding a Sustainable Cooperative Indie Studio in the Apocalypse. For the first 15 minutes, Jess and I spoke about how... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Feb 14, 2025
Hi everyone! I haven't posted in here in *checks* oh my god, over a year? Seriously? Time flies something something, I guess. Anyway, last time I wrote a blog post, I was starting to work on my contribution to the "Joy and Dread" Soft Chaos game album. For a lot of reasons, many of them being that ... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Feb 03, 2025
Hello to everyone! Allison here once again reporting from Soft Chaos Headquarters. As you may have noticed, Soft Chaos had a very busy year+. We did a lot of very rewarding (but very emotionally taxing) teaching followed by being contracted to develop an entire game (which we hope to share wi... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Nov 12, 2024
From Allison (Chibi-Usa), A BrideWhere Part One of this series was written by my person of honour, Part Two has been written by numerous members of the bridal party. This is in part because I was very curious to how they would answer, and in part so I could show off the amazing pictures of our weddi... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Sep 03, 2024
When I, as Allison's Official Person of Honour, asked her what she wanted for her Bachelorette party, I wasn't expecting her answer to be, "I want everyone to dress up as Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote and have a watch party." But, then again, after many years of wildly inventive sc... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jul 22, 2024
Hello Comrades!Allison here, writing on behalf of Soft Chaos. We just wanted to put together a quick post to let you know that we haven’t forgotten about you, and to get you excited about what we’ve been up to for the last 6 months (which we will be able to share fully soon).Firstly: We ... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Feb 27, 2024
Allison: Hello, Soft Chaos, and welcome to your performance review for the 2023 year. I think it's important that we take this time to reflect, see what we've done, see how we can improve, and see where we're going. So, I just have some questions for you about what you've accomplished, your goals mo... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Dec 23, 2023
We here at Soft Chaos wanted to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season, and thank you for all your support for another year! As is tradition, we have brought you pictures of our holiday cats. Expect regularly schedule programming to return after the holidays : )... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Dec 11, 2023
(In case you missed them, here's Part One and Part Two of this series.)I'm going to be completely frank: last summer was not only really hard on Soft Chaos, but also a big scary mental health nightmare for me, personally. It's been a long process to heal from a personal crisis of that magnitude, but... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Nov 17, 2023
(This is Part Two of a series on Soft Chaos's latest SCO, an as-of-yet untitled project that you can read a bit more about in Part One, here.) Games as GemstonesAll summer, we encouraged our workshop students to scope small and polish well. As part of that, we had a guest talk by Droqen, who ca... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Nov 04, 2023
[Jess is posting this on behalf of Allison, who wrote it!]Hello everyone, Allison here!I’m going to begin with some updates, because it’s been a while. This summer, Soft Chaos was busier than it's ever been– with all three of us working well beyond our capacity. This led to burnout... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Jul 26, 2023
Hello, lovely humans!Soft Chaos is still chaotically busy with our summer work, which is why things have been quiet here. It's been just about a month since you last heard from us with a thank you for your continued support. In our absence, please enjoy a free copy of QUEER SLEEPOVER WITCHING H... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jun 27, 2023
Hello to all of our lovely Soft Chaos followers.We have been doing a lot of work this summer to help develop an accesible curriculum for teaching game design and employment skills to autistic youth. While it has been incredibly rewarding, it has also been incredibly exhausting in a plethora of ways.... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on May 24, 2023
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I went to a panel discussion about accessible design. The most eye-opening question for me was how the panelists got into accessibility design. Not one of them identified their own disabilities as a reason. My personal favorite answer was when one... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on May 04, 2023
Sometime earlier this year, I quietly locked my main Twitter account, the one I've had since 2009 and always kept public, and nobody noticed. It's not like anyone's missing much: I post very rarely these days, usually to retweet cool things that Soft Chaos has been up to. Social media in general fee... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Apr 19, 2023
Hello lovely humans! Soft Chaos is back from our vacation!Today, I want to ruminate on some of the gameplay in Dredge and its relationship to time and psychology. I also want to relate my thoughts on design in Dredge back to our current Soft Chaos Original, the as-of-yet-untitled multiplayer digital... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Mar 23, 2023
Hi everyone!This last month has been a wild ride. Allison got engaged and is moving, Squinky's been sick, and Jess has been traveling Japan! In honor of that last thing, we made this beautiful Sanrio avatar banner to announce our March vacation. …sadly in all the chaos I (Allison) forgot to p... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Feb 23, 2023
Hello everyone! Allison here. Today I wanted to talk about what it’s like for me to be working on the kinds of projects Soft Chaos has excelled at: helping people who have no experience making games design their own games. This post will come from my perspective as a systems designer, so pleas... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Feb 02, 2023
Back in October, Jess posted about our newest Soft Chaos Original, which is an as-of-yet still untitled digital escape room project. It is now February (what? how did that happen???) and we've been continuing to have design brainstorm meetings for this project about every two weeks, which is a pace ... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Jan 18, 2023
Jess here!This January marks my TENTH YEAR making games. For this week's Soft Chaos post, I thought I'd do a little bit of reflecting on that anniversary and on a special project that is making my marking ten years of making games especially meaningful.So, when I started to make games in 2013, I was... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Dec 14, 2022
Note: I thought it would be funny to keep the placeholder title from the draft of this post, and honestly couldn't think of a better one so please enjoy.Hello everyone! Allison here once again. Something you’ll notice about these posts is that they frequently end up being about how we are gasl... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Nov 11, 2022
It's now the time of year when seasonal depression tends to kick in for me, and somehow I'm a little bit surprised every time it happens, even though I probably shouldn't be. I was supposed to write a blog post on a completely different topic, struggled with that topic until I was a week later than ... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Oct 24, 2022
Today, Soft Chaos had our very first design session about a new untitled virtual escape room project! This project picks up on the work that we started when we had been granted a residency at the SAT for a VR project but had to drop out of because of team members getting sick. That project, In My Ro... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Oct 04, 2022
I’m here to try to write a bit about the Business (™) side of Soft Chaos. While we are artists, we also have to worry a lot about how to survive in the capitalist hellscape that currently exists. Our process has involved working closely with a local business coach, a Montreal ... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Sep 16, 2022
In my last post from a couple months ago, I discussed how we as a co-op have gradually settled on pursuing two kinds of projects: client contracts and Soft Chaos Originals. One question we've been asked on occasion is, why don't we try to make Soft Chaos Originals our main source of revenue? This is... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Aug 29, 2022
Jess here to talk to you about a yearly tradition that helps me stay creative and keep my work in perspective ever year. So, the Soft Chaos Cooperative shut down for the first week of August for our first ever formal summer vacation! Now, I've never been good at the kind of vacation where ... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Aug 08, 2022
As a cooperative Soft Chaos has realized one thing: despite not being in a traditionally “seasonal” industry, our work and funding has been extremely feast-or-famine. During our last “feast” session we were working on over a half dozen contracts and projects simultaneously. T... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Jul 15, 2022
Back in the mid-2000s, when I was a lot younger than I am now, I used to think I had the whole "career" thing all figured out. If I just got a job in a field I intrinsically enjoyed and wanted to do all the time anyway (namely, making videogames) it would barely feel like work at all, right?As I lat... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Jul 01, 2022
You heard us right! Soft Chaos has welcomed an intern until the end of August. His name is Ryan, and he's a fantastic animator and artist with game design chops to boot! When we made this decision, we were as surprised as anyone. We just turned a year old in May. We're a very new business, and ... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jun 15, 2022
So this has been a busy month for Soft Chaos and for me as an individual, and I’m so excited to get to share some of what is up in the air with you all!First, and most importantly, it is my birthday month! And on my birthday I got to kiss my girlfriend under a giant double rainbow. Which is th... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on May 20, 2022
The following is a sponsored guest post from Poober™.Hi, I'm Chad, founder and CEO of Poober™, writing from my 1000% apocalypse-proof billionaire bunker in [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION]. The fine folks at Soft Chaos were kind enough to let me make an announcement about a Very Important Business... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on May 06, 2022
Hello folks! Thanks for sticking with us over the past couple of difficult weeks!Yesterday, I finished the script for our Cartomancy Anthology game, and today, I started to implement it! As a reminder, our Cartomancy story is called (technically still a working title but I think it's growing on us..... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Apr 18, 2022
Allison here! You may have noticed we missed one of our bi-weekly updates and that this one is a bit late. Soft Chaos has been up to a lot lately: client work, fulfillment for the Cadences crowdfunding campaign (if you missed it, you can check out our pre-order store here), making a game for the Car... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Mar 18, 2022
Earlier this week, Soft Chaos gave a keynote presentation for DiHuCon 2022, a Digital Humanities Conference hosted by folks at the University of Alberta that took place entirely on Discord. The theme we were given was "Kindred Cyberspaces" and was described to us as "an invitation to consider the ne... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Mar 04, 2022
Jess here with some great news, folks. The Cadences IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign has passed the 100%-funded threshold! Whoo! (ICYMI or are interested in funding community copies: we are celebrating by matching all community copy donations. Currently, that means we have 22 community copies!)Since ... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Feb 18, 2022
Hello everyone! Allison here again : )As you probably know, we’ve been running a crowdfunding campaign for Cadences: The Story of a Distance and Its Pair.It’s been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to talk about design, process and community! I’ve shared my thoughts on supportin... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Feb 11, 2022
Hello, folks!Remember last week, when we told you that Cadences: The Story of a Distance and Its Pair would be crowdfunding in time for Valentine's Day as part of #ZiMo2022? We launched today, meaning you can now get access to earlybird tiers that greatly discount the project :3. Help this community... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Feb 04, 2022
Hello, hello! Jess here! Happy Black History Month! In 2022, the global theme for Black History Month is Black Health and Wellness. In Montreal, it's "Honour the past, inspire the future". It's the perfect time to learn about Black History and support Black people in the present. Depending on w... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Jan 21, 2022
For the better part of the month, I've been hard at work coding our shiny new website. While it's still very much under construction (insert the appropriate 90s animated gifs here), it's already starting to look quite fabulous, especially thanks to the work of our designer and branding expert, Brand... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Jan 07, 2022
“Marginalized game workers will have a say in their working conditions and benefit from their own labour, ending their exploitation in the game industry so that they can focus on projects that excite and appeal to them and have better living conditions.”One of the first things Soft Chaos... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Dec 24, 2021
The Soft Chaos Team is on holiday break, so instead of our usual format, we decided to share the joys of Catmas with you, featuring our official team cats: Burt Lahr and Sweenie O'Toole, Guybrush Food St. Jacques and Cecil Tobermory Kalervo Sinervo Fenelon, and Neko the Cat! There are lots of w... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Dec 10, 2021
Hello comrades! Today, it's time for a deep cut from the top secret vault of unfinished Soft Chaos projects. That's right, I'm going to tell you the story of the very first thing that the three of us ever decided to work on together, back in the increasingly distant year of 2015: something we have b... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Nov 26, 2021
Hello again, Comradery!Allison here to update you on the exploits and adventures of Soft Chaos.To start off, I want to say that behind the scenes, there is so much exciting stuff happening for the Soft Chaos team. We’ve always been confident in our abilities and our members, but we’ve su... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Nov 12, 2021
At the end of October, the Soft Chaos team finished off a project for a competition called "Power and Control" run by an organization that aims to prevent violence among teens, particularly those in romantic relationships. We were named as finalists for the competition in early October and had about... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Oct 29, 2021
Hi, it's Squinky again. So, here's the thing: initially, I had been planning to write a blog post about one of our "One a Month" games that Allison alluded to a couple of weeks ago. Sadly, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't bring myself to focus well enough to do the topic justice. Instead,... Continue reading
Posted by Prairie on Oct 15, 2021
Hello World!I’m Allison, the third co-founder of Soft Chaos. It’s finally my turn at the wheel to let you know what has been happening with us (and it has been a lot!).The first thing that we want to do is give a big thank you to everyone who has supported us so far. With your help, we&r... Continue reading
Posted by squinky on Oct 01, 2021
Hi everyone! I'm D. Squinkifer, one of the three worker-owners of Soft Chaos, and I wanted to announce that I've just finished a new videogame project, titled Squinky and the Squinkettes present: SECOND PUBERTY!SECOND PUBERTY started out as a project wherein I wanted to explore feelings around gende... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Sep 17, 2021
Welcome, welcome! The Soft Chaos Cooperative is excited by all of you who have decided to join in on the chaos so far! Thank you. We can't wait to share cool stuff with you!We wanted to let you know what you can expect from us on here in a bit more detail. In a nutshell, the more support that we hav... Continue reading
Posted by jekagames on Aug 20, 2021
We're ecstatic to announce that as part of the Pervers/Cité festival, which is part of Montreal Pride, we'll be running Strangers on the 'Net on August 26th and September 2nd 2021. This two-part interactive theatre piece features wonderful facilitators with a ratio of one facilitator to three... Continue reading
