Code Pergola

Since we just founded a company, we just settled on a collection of everyday software tools enabling our work. We focussed our selection process on open source, privacy-friendly software. Selecting such tools is a common problem for many companies in their earliest phase and the option to simply use the entire Google or Microsoft suite can be tempting. As a founder, you choose tools that will get you going quickly. But they should also scale well enough that you don't have to worry about them for a while. Unlike a big corporation, you don't want to spend a ton of time on a thorough evaluation process. Experience reports from others certainly helped us on this journey, so we wanted to give back by sharing our own as well. Our tool choice was of course influenced by being a two people company making software and games. Our essential needs were: 1. Communication 2. Sharing code, files and secrets 3. Managing tasks and projects 4. Tracking worktime All these have to be met for us and for a few select collaborators. Ideally, they will be solved by as few tools as possible. We ended up working with software such as The Zulip Open Source Project, Nextcloud and solidtime. Read more about the process behind that on our blog, you'll find the link in the comments. #opensource #digitalsovereignty #smallbusiness

We were nominated for the Narrative Design Awards 2026 with our entry Companion Plant, so we reviewed the jam to understand what went well and where we can improve. We went into the jam with three people: Sarah Werner and Emilia Bopp from Code Pergola, and Cursa, an independent author. After a brief introduction we decided it would be fun to make a game together. At first we approached the jam in a very unstructured manner, thinking we should not overdo our planning to remain flexible. This was a short game jam meant to be fun and creative after all. However, we quickly realized that we were lacking clarity: oftentimes someone was unsure what to do, what the others on the team were up to or what the big picture of the game looked like. Soon enough we scheduled a planning session. Mapping out all the features that Cursa would need to write a story helped us to constrain the scope. Thus, we knew how much we had to implement on the technical side and what assets to produce for the game to be minimally playable. This was a tremendous help, but we still ended up with some crunch on the day of the deadline having to stretch our internal cut-off time. Submitting around midnight was not ideal, but we got to the finish line. 😅 This is the first part of our review article. Check out the link to our blog post in the comments for the full review. #gamejam #gamedev #indiegames #visualnovel

We just released our preliminary logo trying to capture the essence of how we work. We opted for a still stylized, but more complex look than usual trying to convey a sense of care and thoroughness – a bit of a human touch if you will. This logo is still due to change as the details of the design system for our website are being worked out. I'd love to get some feedback on the design: what impression does this have on you? What associations come up when you look at it?

Last week we released Companion Plant, our jam entry to the Narrative Design Awards. We worked on this with an author and were quite happy with the result as it was the first time we finished a small but complete jam game with this particular team setup. The game is freely available on itch. Check out the in the comments to play! We appreciate any feedback. #gamedev #indiegames