ALDERCONE STUDIO COLLECTIVE

About Aldercone

Aldercone Studio is a micro art and tech worker-owned collective!

Founded in 2019 with an initial concentration on creating video games, we quickly expanded to gayly and disabledly crafting in a wide variety of mediums. We now make video games, art, TTRPGs, music, madkrip zines, community-oriented tech endevors, and other works for and with our fellow queers, autistics, Global Majority folks, disabled folks, and the many of us who are marginalized.

We bring our unique individual perspectives and multigenerational collective outlook, crippled bogpunk work ethic, and over six decades of collective technical and artistic experience to everything we do. We fully devote our efforts in a holistic manner to our twin goals of connecting deeply with other marginalized folks like our selves and the authentic representation of the symmetry and discordance of our selves as unique and interdependent beings.

So basically, we're a weird indie studio doing awesome weird things in several mediums!

About Our Merry Band of Skallywags

Each of our crew brings their own unique outlook that adds to the fabric that is the whole of our collective.

Evel

Evel, an autistic/ADHD, disabled, and chronically ill Indigequeer Xicane, is a multi-discipline-breaking designer and producer with over 20 years experience in art and graphic design, as well as more than 10 years of IT and web engineering. Xen is passionate about community building, disability rights, Indigenous self-determination, dogs, and resting. Xen wants the world to be a better place for folks like xenselves and xens work as a worker-owner of the Aldercone Studio collective always centers this goal. In short, xen is a fat brown freak who can’t spell and wants to affirm the hell outta you!

Evel is currently working on a disabled-as-default TTRPG character creator, fediverse-integrated mutual aid groups project, and several creative projects.

Phoenix

Phoenix Fierro is an autistic, ADHD, Indigenous (Chicane) and Slavic published author, playwright, and game designer. They are a worker-owner of the Aldercone Studio Collective, where their work involves writing, designing, QA testing, and participating in the general running of the collective. They love exploring how people and the world function, and illustrating the indominibility of the human spirit through their art. They especially like to work in the mediums of table-top role-playing games and video games. Phoenix has strong interests in the history of video games, postmodernism and cyberpunk, cats of all types, moths, and fighting for a better world.

Phoenix is currently working on several creative writing projects, particularly enjoying working alongside programs offered by the Storytelling Collective.

Cassowary

Cassowary is a queer artist and IT professional, working in computers and the arts for more than 20 years. They have participated in many Free Software projects, including the Debian project, P.I.K.A., and many others, as well as working at one of the top-10 websites in the world. They are a worker-owner of Aldercone Studio, where they make art and games with the goal of creating beauty for themself and their communities. They are repsonsible for most of the software and IT infrastructure that are used by Aldercone and Heckin’ Technology, including choices of game frameworks, collectively hosted online tools, and solutions to our community technical needs.

Cassowary currently mostly works on maintaining our infrastructure as well as Cayenne M'Cormik and other programming projects.

Junior mumber Lupé

Lupé is our junior member! As a Junior member of Aldercone Studio, they work when they feel inspired to, but still have full voting rights.

Their unique Indigenous 0Spirit neurodivergent point of view, plus their ceaseless world creation, synergizes with our collective projects and we produce their many individual ideas as well. Lupé often acts as our art co-director and sound designer on projects, and they have been invaluable in many Aldercone productions. They love eldritch, monster, and soft-gore themes, and are developing a distinctive digital visual arts style around these. They desire to bring both joy and a bit of mayhem with their work.

Lupé is currently working on a lowercase-ambient album as well as a subversive retro-style game.

Adjunct member Fyrfli

fyrfli has nearly two decades of experience as a programmer and administrator in Information Technology, including a wide breadth of technical knowledge in HTML, CSS, Python, SQL, VIM, and Linux. She holds an Associates Degree in Information Technology, a Bachelor in Intercultural Communication, and a Master in Clinical Social Work. They are also certified as a Facilitative Mediator. An eclectic creative soul, she can usually be found taking photographs and writing code, as well as dabbling in ink, paint, digital drawing, and creative writing. Currently an adjunct member of Aldercone, they’re here to learn how a flat-hierarchy Native-led group works and collaborate on the collective’s projects, from community-tech infrastructure to making video games.

Our Projects

We always have many projects big and small in production and we regulary publish finished music, games, source-available code, art, and other creative undertakings!

Here’s just a few of our many favorite released and in-progress projects!

Cayenne M’Cormik

Cayenne M’Cormik is a detective adventure game with survival mechanics about insurance adjustment in a far-flung corporate oligarchy future. The player will explore derelict spaceships, and with abductive, deductive, and inductive investigative reasoning discover the causes of the calamatous incidents.

The player will explore a large galaxy through the eyes of the titular character, Cayenne, a vaguely relevant gig worker, while dealing with the various horrors of space (whether imagined by conglomerates or real) in a multi-scenario storyline. Along with the storyline career-mode, there will also be a procedurally created endless mode to provide our players with infinite puzzletastic adventures to relish!

Inspired by the gameplay of Nethack and old school point-and-click adventures as well as being influenced by 80s and 90s space horror and cyberpunk films, Cayenne M’Cormik uniquely tells an important tale of living under a corporatocracy and uncovering the propaganda of the system — through the medium of insurance adjusting.

Release of newest demo version: 2025

Creature Feature the TTRPG

Creature Feature is a one-shot comedy-horror TTRPG inspired by monster b-movies. Guided by the Storyteller, 2 to 5 players cooperatively play out a string of scenes, affected by the players actions, and ending in a thrilling climax! This is a story-telling heavy game with simple mechanics to guide the ebb and flow. Characters, Creatures, and Settings are based on simple yet dynamic archetypes from horror films.

Coming soon will be two new additions, Creature Feature Director’s Cut, which will include lots of table to roll on to set up your game, and Creature Feature Grindhouse Edition, a crunchy multi-session mechanic-heavy version!

Full release: 2023 for that year’s One-Page TTRPG Jam

Director’s Cut and Grindhouse Edition releases: Winter of 2025/2026

Seven Ravens

A work-in-progress, Seven Ravens is rules-lite comedy murder mystery TTRPG. The players collaboratively play as a group of strangers, linked in some ineffable way, who cross into an occult realm called The Veil, and must help each other solve their individual mysteries together in order to escape. As a story-telling heavy game, there is a Storyteller player who weaves a supernatural tapestry for the other players to uncover and discover more about themselves, each other, and their pasts.

Simple to set up yet complex and interesting to play, it will feature premade scenarios, maps, characters, and other details while still also allowing Storytellers to completely create their own unique stories for their players.

Release date: TBA

Alderwood Point

Relax in the mountains at Alderwood Point, a small medatative game about watching the natural scenery and taking photographs of the beings passing you by! While there is a reason you’re out here, and something you’re looking for, your main goal is to enjoy the ambience and natural scenery, and to decompress.

The graphics are from public domain sources, including the defunct browser-based MMORG, Glitch. Made to show you don’t need AI generated-imagery when there is so much beautiful people made art out there!

Full release: 2025

P.I.K.App and heckIMP

P.I.K.A. (Photo and Image Kooker Application) and heckIMP are twin projects to make a free software rebranding of the GnuIMP project. heckIMP itself is a set of scripts which takes the GnuIMP codebase and applies transformations to it in order to completely remove the original branding, replacing it with configured values, and P.I.K.A. is the Aldercone rebranding of it. It’s named after a pika because they are so cute!

Release date: beta out, support for GnuIMP 3.0 TBA.

Support the Aldercones

There are many ways to support us, such us following us on social media, downloading our digital creations, and especially by sharing our rad releases with yours friends and becoming a monthly supporter on our Comradery!

Because we want to make sure others of us who are marginalized and struggling have access to affirming and joyful things, most of our work is available for free or for a very low price! We are not in it for the money, nor do we have any desire to be capitalists, but we do need money to pay for housing, utilities, disability needs, and so on for our collective members.

Direct support options

Comradery
https://comradery.co/aldercone
Comradery is a cooperatively-owned payment platform, giving you a very cool way for to support us monthly. When you support us here, you’ll get discounts to itch.io and Bandcamp, as well as early-access to our newsletters and exclusive behind-the-scenes posts!

Ko-Fi
https://ko-fi.com/aldercone
Many folks seem to like ko-fi, which allows you to support us with monthly and one-time donations. This is also where we will soon™ be selling digital and physical art and other handiworks!

Other support sites
If the above two platforms don’t work as well for you as they do for us, here are other great options!