"Good games. Useful resources. Ethical subroutines."

I'm Mark LaCroix, a developer, game designer and visual artist based in Minneapolis. Though my company, Noble Robot, I make and publish indie games, and develop free, open-source, and paid tools/resources for game development.

Sponsors will be directly contributing to the development of the free tools and resources that Noble Robot publishes to GitHub, including Noble Engine, the first game engine for the Playdate handheld console, and STML (or: Sleeptime Markup Language), the text format that powers the fake internet of Dreamsettler.

Good games

As a company, Noble Robot developed and published Widget Satchel with a small team in 2019, and began porting and publishing other developers' indie games to Nintendo Switch starting in 2020. Noble Robot co-developed the sequel to the hit "1999-simulator" Hypnospace Outlaw, Dreamsettler. On Dreamsettler, I am one of two lead programmers, a co-designer, and a visual artist. Noble Robot is also the sole development studio for the PC/Console version of [TBA], where I also contributed heavily to expanding the game's design space and visual language.

As a individual contributor, in 2021 I did development work and additional art for the sprawling, ambitious narrative game Closed Hands, which was nominated for an IGF award in 2022. And in 2023, the card game I developed with my Nice Games Club co-hosts, Glom, was published by Indie Boards & Cards.

Useful resources

In addition to the tools/resources that Noble Robot publishes, I produce and co-host the weekly indiedev podcast Nice Games Club. The show is recorded out of a small coworking and event space that I operate in Minneapolis.

The space at Noble Robot hosts in-person events for the Twin Cities chapter of the IGDA (International Game Developer's Association), of which I am a board member, including the annual Global Game Jam and the monthly Twin Cities Playtest, and offers very low-cost coworking desks for artists and developers based in the Twin Cities.

Ethical subroutines

Games by Noble Robot celebrate a spirit of adventure, optimism, and humanism, with an emphasis on holistic design and mechanics that invite (and examine the implications of) multiple approaches to play.

I value empathy as an artist, which goes beyond my work. It also means a commitment to provide tools, offer assistance, foster community, and build infrastructure for others to be better able to express themselves, too.

As a result, Noble Robot is a highly productive but aggressively middling business, operating on a low- to no-profit basis in most years.

In order to grow and sustain the work that Noble Robot does both as a developer and as community resource, what I really need is time, but since that's pretty hard to come by, I'll take some money if you have any. 😄