Since being founded back in 2017, Summerfall Studios have only managed to put out a couple of games, 2023’s Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, and last year’s Malys, a devil exercising deckbuilder. Unfortunately for the studio, neither game did amazingly, but according to co-founder and Dragon Age writer David Gaider, the studio is hoping to work on something new still: a heist RPG.

“You play a crew of rogues in an airship that go around performing heists,” Gaider tells PC Gamer in an interview. “And this leads you into a plot that becomes, maybe, your more typical RPG.” With this next game, Gaider says he’s hoping to do something that’s “not full-on comedy, but something that could make me smile. It seems like at this point in the world, we could use something like that. I know I could. So that’s what we’ve been working on, and it’s been getting a great reception.”

This is where the but comes in, the but that’s shaped like a collapsing games industry. “It’s been almost three years it’s been going through this weird contraction. The most obvious effect of that is all the layoffs, but that’s just really a symptom of all the studios clenching at once,” Gaider explains. On the funding side, nobody wants to actually commit to a project unless they think it’s a sure thing, and that boils down to existing IPs, sequels, that sort of thing. New projects, almost nothing’s getting funded.”

On the plus side, according to Gaider the response has been positive, but so far no publishing fish have been biting. They even asked one publisher whether they’re essentially waiting for the game to be finished. “And they embarrassedly were like, ‘Well, in so many words, I guess, yeah,'” Gaider said. “There’s a lot of smaller studios like ours that are really struggling at this point.”

Through it all, Gaider doesn’t seem to cut up at the idea of not being able to make this mysterious heist RPG. “Not everything lasts forever. Seven or eight years is a nice long run, and it’s been fantastic.” But on the point of what would hypothetically come after, he sounds less confident. “As to what I would do afterwards, if that was the end of Summerfall, I don’t know. Is it even possible to find a job in the industry these days? Would I be competing with people of my own seniority, and begging for a job?” Fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that, because personally I’d quite like a silly heist RPG. Hop to it publishers!