Logo Studio Mystery

Project Update August 2026

By Rare Hydrogen

I’m going to try something a little different and write a very meta, state-of-the-brand type post.

I have been lost in the woods for six years

For the last six years, I’ve been lost in the woods of side projects.

Six years ago, I had the idea to build a bootstraped brand, a video game studio called Studio Mystery. Over those six years, I’ve done a lot of stuff.

  • I wrote a SAAS app to parse a PDF into a customizable JSON body.
  • I quit my main job twice, and found two new jobs.
  • I managed a project rebuilding an enterprise ERP from start to finish (which took at least a decade off my life).
  • I wrote a first draft of a novel (Soft War - Predator, Prey).
  • I wrote three drafts of a different novel (Soft War - Strikebreaker).
  • In between all that, I’ve spent hundreds of hours on a Godot-based game called Esmerelda and the Black Amber Covenant.

When I first had the Studio Mystery idea, this is exactly the kind of ping-pong project management I wanted to avoid.

And yet here I am. Lost in the woods. No real progress being made.

The last 24 hours being lost in the woods

Today, I’ve begun to seriously question who my target market is. Both at the macro brand level and at the product level.

Like, who exactly do I expect to actually read this Soft War book series once I’m done with it? It doesn’t really fit into any existing SciFi genre, as far as I can tell. Maybe that’s my own lack of knowledge. Maybe there is a genre out there for it and I just don’t know about it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that the genre beats I should be using as guide posts and refining towards are unknown to me. More research is required, and further editing…

… But that still doesn’t answer my target market question. Who am I even writing this for?

So if the problem is me being lost in the woods, then the solution I need is a map.

  1. I should make a general update post once a month. This being the first one.
  2. I should finish this book project:
    • Finish my last read-through.
    • Let my wife continue to edit it chapter by chapter. Use her editing skills.
    • Ignore the target market questions for now. Perfect is the enemy of done.
    • Fix the cover like my wife said.
    • Fix the logo on the website.
    • Continue my publishing schedule to completion.
    • Release it in October like I wanted to
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