Posted on August 17, 2020
Grind! Craft! IA!
So I’m getting back on the horse today, officially beginning development on the Grindcraftia prototype.

Posted on April 3, 2020
How I Deal
I made a tribute game for my wife. It’s a point-and-click soft horror game with jumpscares.
https://jetspice.itch.io/two-are-in-the-mist
She died of cancer 3/1/2020. I tried to capture the mood of what it was like – surreal, fearful, glimmers of hope. You might be afraid. You might cry. You might feel beauty.
After she died, the world went into lockdown. The coronavirus spread like a cancer, like a dark mist. Today, people stay indoors. Waiting it out. Wondering about food. Worrying about health. And for some, struggling to breathe. It feels a lot like what my family just went through over the last 2 years.
Proceeds from donations toward this game go to offset the costs my family faced while battling cancer.
Posted on March 2, 2020
My wife, Natalya Spicer, passed away today, March 1, 2020, at 7:12 am Pacific time. She leaves behind 3 young boys, CJ, Leo, and Alex, myself, and her parents. She was their only child. If you feel led to contribute to our GoFundMe, please do so here: gf.me/u/xjfyjn . We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Dan 3:17-18
I wrote the below post the day before. But I felt like there was a reason to not post it on that day:
My wife is dying. I find it hard to focus on development. When I started this blog, I talked about passion, and how a person’s passion is formed by the events they go through in life, and at some point, the sum total of all a person’s experiences kind of hits a critcal mass and you find your passion. When you are young, life changes your mind. When you are older, your mind changes life. But sometimes something happens that resets your whole person. For me, if my wife dies, that will reset me. I don’t know who I’m going to be after that. My core character traits – my bones – will transfer over to that new person. But I don’t know what skin and muscles are going to be on that new person.

I believe that my wife can be healed by the power and the Name of Jesus. But I don’t know the future, and should she die, I don’t know what will happen to me. Will I be half the man I used to be, or will tragedy refine me in some unpredictable way?
I usually keep my personal affairs out of my developer’s blog. The primary reason I make games is to have some sort of impact on the players. I have a compassion for my players. I love listening to them, answering their emails, and thinking about them while I design games. Even though I run it like a business, designing games is a matter of the heart. And so including the news of my wife’s disease is also a matter of the heart. I can’t really keep it separate. It will affect Grindcraftia in some manner.
Thanks for reading.
Posted on February 11, 2020
Some heavy news.
I have some heavy news today. My wife has stage 4 cancer and may not live too long. We have 3 kids. This is why game development has been so sporadic. If you can, please support us in this fight: http://gf.me/u/xjfyjn More details here: http://jetspicegames.com/spicers I am still working on the Grindcraftia prototype for a spring release.
Posted on January 11, 2020
All the Kids
It’s been a little over a month since actively developing Grindcraftia. The main characters in Grindcraftia are referred to as kids. Grindcraftia kids. Here’s a celebration video of all the kids made over the last month:
Posted on December 31, 2019
Time
I never thought I’d see the year 2020. Coincidentally, I recently worked out time measurements in Grindcraftia.
1=1 One second in Grindcraftia equals one second in the real world.
Based on 8 An animation frame is 125 milliseconds, or 1/8th of a second. The standard “walking” animation, has eight frames. It takes a Grindcraftia character exactly one second to move through a walk cycle.
Time and Space Not only is time based on eight, but also space. When the standard Grindcraftia character walks, it moves forward eight voxels. Not all characters will do this, but the standard “kid” model does. A block in Grindcraftia is made up of eight sub-blocks, and each of those is made up of eight voxels. Voxels are themselves made up of materials, cells, molecules, atoms, particles, and singularities — the timespace continuum of Grindcraftia. Mostly it’s inspired by Tetris, which used the rule of four to create all possible 2d combinations of four squares, called tetrominoes, which, falling from the sky, made one of the most significant games ever.
Here’s a Chart
game time | game time | real time | ||||
1 | second | = | 1 | second | = | 1 real second |
1 | minute | = | 8 | seconds | = | 8 real seconds |
1 | hour | = | 8 | minutes | = | 1 real minute |
1 | day | = | 8 | hours | = | 8.5 real minutes |
1 | week | = | 8 | days | = | 1 real hour |
1 | month | = | 8 | weeks | = | 9 real hours |
1 | year | = | 8 | months | = | 3 real days |
1 | decade | = | 8 | years | = | 24 real days |
1 | century | = | 8 | decades | = | half a year |
Time in Grindcraftia starts tomorrow, January 1, 2020. Happy Time Day, Grindcraftia. You won’t have a body yet, but you’ll exist. We aim to launch the prototype within a few months, meaning that early adopters will be starting the game three or four decades after time started. But don’t fret. If you want to go back to the dawn of time in Grindcraftia (and see what happened), you need only craft a time machine.
Posted on December 28, 2019
Skin Tones
In all my games, it’s important to me to get skin tones right. In Grindcraftia, the pallete is purposefully limited to 64 colors, and 4 of them are used for skin.
Here’s an image I got from a cosmetic company. The middle row is the original image. The top row uses only two colors, which is great for a 16-color pallete. The bottom row uses four main colors and a few accent colors, perfect for a 64-color pallete.
Posted on December 19, 2019
Character Designs
Here are some character designs for Grindcraftia. Our goal is to have a working demo this winter. Some of the below characters are rendered using a building block toy. We purposefully designed the characters so they would be easy for players to make clothes and hair for, and to make into toys. Fingers crossed, we’ll have a toy deal some day.
Keen eyes may recognize the design from long ago. Can you find the woodsman below?
Posted on December 1, 2019