There’s a special kind of madness that only makes sense to small teams. In late July, we shipped PaddleUP! on the 23rd and then, six days later, we shipped Type Fighters on the 29th. Two games. One week. One very tired but very happy studio in London.
People keep asking us the same question, usually with a slightly worried look: why would you do that to yourselves? Fair. So here’s the honest version, the good, the chaotic, and the stuff we’d tell any other tiny team thinking about doing something similar.
Why two at once (we promise there was a reason)
We didn’t set out to launch two games in the same week. It just kind of… happened. PaddleUP! and Type Fighters had been cooking on parallel tracks for a while, and as the weeks went on, their finish lines drifted closer and closer together until one morning we looked at the calendar and went, “oh. Oh.“
At that point you have two choices. You can artificially hold one back and space them out neatly, the sensible, spreadsheet-approved move. Or you can lean into the chaos, treat it as a proper studio moment, and let two very different little games walk out the door together. We picked chaos. We usually do.
The nice thing is that PaddleUP! and Type Fighters could not be more different, which meant they weren’t fighting over the same audience. PaddleUP! is a loud, fast arcade paddle game, trick shots, risky flips, keep-the-ball-alive-with-pure-reflex energy. Type Fighters is exactly what it sounds like: a fighting game where your keyboard is the controller, with 15 fighters and well over 150 secret techniques to dig up. One is reflexes in your thumbs, the other is reflexes in your fingertips. Turns out that’s a pretty comfortable pair to release side by side.
What actually got hard
The building wasn’t the hard part. The switching was.
When you’re a small team, launch week isn’t really about code, it’s about a hundred tiny non-game tasks all coming due at once. Store pages. Capsule art. Trailers. Pricing. That one build that passes locally and then sulks the moment it hits Steam. Now double all of it, stagger it by six days, and try to keep both sets of details straight in your head without accidentally putting PaddleUP!’s trailer on Type Fighters’ page. (We did not do this.)
The thing nobody warns you about is context-switching fatigue. Shipping one game is a sprint. Shipping two back-to-back is a sprint where someone hands you a completely different baton halfway through and says “same energy, please.” By day five we were running on tea, muscle memory, and Finn quietly judging us from the corner of the office.
The stuff that went right
Here’s the part we didn’t expect: doing them together made each launch lighter, not heavier.
Because we’d just been through the entire checklist for PaddleUP!, the whole machine was already warm when Type Fighters’ turn came around. We knew which store fields always trip us up. We knew how long the trailer render actually takes versus how long we optimistically think it takes. We’d already made and fixed the small dumb mistakes once, so we didn’t get to make them twice. The second launch felt less like a fresh mountain and more like walking a path we’d just cleared.
It also did something good for morale. Two launch days in one week is two little bursts of “we made a thing and put it into the world.” For a small studio, those moments are the fuel. Getting two of them close together was genuinely lovely, exhaustion and all.
Would we do it again?
Honestly? Probably. But with eyes open.
If you’re a tiny team staring down a similar situation, here’s what we’d actually pass along. Don’t space launches out just because a calendar says you should, but do make sure the two games aren’t chasing the same players, or you’ll cannibalise your own week. Batch the boring stuff: if you’re already deep in store-page brain, knock out both store pages while you’re in there. Protect one real rest day between the two launches, even if it feels indulgent, because launch day you will be very grateful to prep day you. And accept up front that some things will be scrappier than a single launch timeline would allow. Scrappy and shipped beats polished and imaginary.
Two games, six days apart, done by a team you could fit around one table. We’re still a little tired. We’re also pretty proud.
PaddleUP! and Type Fighters are both out on Steam now, go make some noise with one and hammer your keyboard with the other. And as always: no sharks were harmed during development. Finn checked.
— Team Sharkbowl