What’s Up With Tripping Whale

It’s been a couple months since we announced the forced short term retirement of Duple Dragon thanks to the Unity debacle. So what have we been up to since then? It might look quiet from the outside, but all three of us have been quite busy with a variety of extracurricular pursuits.

While we don’t have any official Tripping Whale news to announce right now, we wanted to take a moment to talk about what we’re all up to at the moment, and to wish you and yours very happy holidays, whatever you may be celebrating this year.

Caleb is Working on Contracts

Caleb is in the middle of a couple of tough programming contracts, one of which has a New Year’s deadline. As usual, regardless of working full-time, he continues to invest his free time investigating/exploring technological options that will reduce the time/friction that it takes to implement games and apps, with a special interest in what today’s machine learning can do for all of us. What little time is left after that he dedicates to playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with his closest friends.

Ian is Doing Hobby Game Dev

Ian is working on a little cozy island-themed RPG Maker game. While Duple Dragon was a team effort with commercial intent, this project is just for fun and has no particular goals in mind beyond getting the creative juices flowing and having a good time making it.

RPG Maker is a really simple game engine that’s been around for years, and specializes in making a very specific style of old-school 2D RPG. While it’s quite limited in what it can do, it’s also very fast to develop in, and Ian has been having a blast digging into it.

Here’s a little sneak peek at what it looks like:

If you want to follow progress on the project, the current best way to do is to follow Ian on Bluesky, where he’s been posting occasional updates. If you’re interested in hearing more about this project, let us know! We’re not sure how side projects like this fit into the larger Tripping Whale umbrella yet, so we’d love to hear if you’re interested in hearing about them in our blog as well.

Souren is Welding Pipes

Souren has been taking a hiatus from Tripping Whale in the short term, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t busy. After going through welding school last year (and graduating with flying colors early this one), he’s been working his butt off welding industrial piping with a team of pipe fitters on the South Carolina World Trade Center.

He’s also working on his truck, getting it running so that he can start to do welding jobs on his own terms as a sole proprietor, and maybe get some travel in as a bonus. He plans to return to work on Tripping Whale projects once we’ve ramped up again, and once the contracts slow down and he has more time again.

Happy Holidays!

Thanks for checking in with us this holiday season, and whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or something else entirely, we hope you’re warm and cozy and enjoying some time with your friends and loved ones. While we don’t have much to talk about these days, that won’t be true forever, and we have multiple ideas brewing right now. Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for being part of the Tripping Whale community.