Golden Grove Games

Wheel of Misfortune

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wheel of Misfortune is the game show nobody asked to be on. Spin a rigged wheel, solve phrases under pressure, and spend your hard-earned souls on upgrades from a hellhound in a waistcoat. Ratings are through the roof. Contestants are not doing great.

Droprunner

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Two runners. One node. Only one walks out with the data. Droprunner is a cyberpunk tile-laying strategy game–build your rig, pick your mods, and fight for control of a server node one drop at a time.

Tomb of the Snake King

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You’re an adventurer in a cursed tomb–hat, whip, gun, the works. Every piece of gold you grab latches on behind you, growing a tail of cursed treasure that makes you longer, slower, and harder to keep alive. The catch? The only way out is to collect it all.

Introducing Droprunner

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The idea for this game started with Triple Triad–the card game buried inside Final Fantasy, back when that meant a PlayStation and a CRT television. The core mechanic always struck me as quietly brilliant: play a card, compare edges, flip what you beat. Simple enough to learn in thirty seconds, but meaningful enough to anchor a much bigger game around it. I was always shocked that nobody ever built a larger game around it (or maybe they did, but it never surfaced to me–did this happen? Should I stop?! Tell me now!!)

Pixel Art on the Train

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am not an artist. I should get that out of the way up front. I’m a programmer who, through a series of events that seemed reasonable at the time, ended up being the person making all the pixel art for Tomb of the Snake King. On an iPad. On the train to work.

The original jam sprites were made by Fintan and Ellie back in 2021, using Piskel. They were great–especially for a fifteen-year-old and a 12-year old working to a deadline while I was 5,000 miles away working in Seattle. But when we rebuilt ToSK from scratch, we needed a complete new set of art to match the new design. Fintan’s doing game design in college now. Ellie’s moved on. That left me.

From Game Jam to the Snake King's Tomb

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2021, my kid Fintan–fifteen at the time–and I sat down for a weekend to enter our very first game jam. ZenoJam 3, theme: “It Never Ends.” We built Tomb of the Snake King in Unity, a roguelike-meets-snake game where you collect cursed treasure that follows you around, growing your tail while you dodge mummies and scarabs. Fintan and little sister Ellie did all the pixel art and music. We came 5th out of 79 entries, which for a first jam felt pretty great! It certainly inspired us to try more, although I don’t think we’ve ever done as well since :-D

Hello from Golden Grove Games

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We finally have a real blog–not just an itch.io RSS mirror, but a proper home for updates across all our games and projects.

For the last few years we’ve been building games as a family (and roping in friends along the way). We’ve got three on the go right now: Wheel of Misfortune, a phrase-solving roguelite run by demons; Droprunner, a cyberpunk tile-laying strategy game; and Tomb of the Snake King, a retro arcade dungeon crawler that started as a game jam entry and refused to stay dead. We also make Godotidy, a code formatting tool for Godot, because apparently we can’t stop building tools.