September 2025 Monthly Studio Report

Summer is mostly over! The Father's Story has it's release date! Time for our monthly report!

What a month we had here at Broken Hammer. The first order of business for the month was getting the Mac OS version of the game notarized and instead of it taking weeks, we managed to get it done in about four hours. After that, we quickly moved forward on finalizing the release date and pricing. What changed for this vs for Dust and Air? Well, to be honest, the fact that we were able to leverage Grok + Gemini to help troubleshoot the process. The problem with Apple's system is that it's not streamlined and it's dependent upon certifications and app passwords that can have time limits.

This is why when we attempted it before, we gave up because there existed no real guide for navigating it at the time. Just forum posts from other devs who themselves often times said it could be hit or miss. Since it involves time sensitive factors, that makes sense why they often gave up.

Much of it all simply doesn't make much sense and screams of redundancy all so Apple can say a developer is legit. For the amount of money Apple makes, they clearly do not want to overhaul it. The entire thing could be as easy as Steam is but it isn't. The reason why we had a breakthrough after four hours on one day was all due to AI, which could parse the net to find what would work from more websites than we were aware of. Long story short, we were ecstatic when we finally saw the status of our title as accepted. After that, it wasn't much to do a Linux build and then start testing. Which, took longer than getting things notarized. Partly because Steam has some quirks when it comes to uploading different platforms on one build. Which aren't covered in guides very well but, once we figured it out, testing proceeded well and we got three platforms ready to go.

As we sit right now, we're ready to release on Steam but will give it till December 1st launch date to handle any last minute issues that might crop up. We're also in the process of getting the game a little more attention before launch. Going into October, we're going to be working on that and also getting both Android and iOS versions up. On the Android side, we likely will just keep the release to itch again since the Google Play Store system is, in some ways, worse than Apple. iOS will likely include a Mac OS version for the App store there as well. It's not much to just check a box on Apple developer to enable it.

There is no ETA on the mobile versions but the APK one will likely launch with the desktop versions because it will be on itch. Of course, depending upon if it doesn't have any major issues. As September wrapped up, we did find one issue with the Android version and playing videos to which we're troubleshooting.

With The Father's Story wrapping up, attention definitely turns back to Dust and Air and there are questions of if we'll get that title notarized now that we have it functional in this? While we think it is definitely possible, we need to consider more of an overhaul of Dust and Air, as well as new direction for some elements of the story expansions.

For now, we're going to see The Father's Story to release and try to get that as much traction as we can. This has been quite the side project and it has taught us much that we'll be applying to Dust and Air and future projects.

Alright, that's it for September. We'll see you in the skies!