Misfits Attic recently announced Duskers 2.0 inside PC Gamer’s PC Gaming Show and that the game has been funded by Max McGuire’s project fund: Stray Signal. The official Duskers 2.0 teaser trailer debuted to delighted fans around the globe. You can check it out for yourself here:
If you want to support Misfits Attic, wishlist Duskers 2.0 here on Steam!
For Duskers’ 10 year anniversary, Tim shows a glimpse of the pen and paper prototypes that helped him originally design the game.
Additionally, in honor of the original Duskers turning 10 years old this year, the award-winning title will be featured in various bundles and promotions throughout the summer.
In a world where equity-based prototype funding doesn’t exist beyond Elbow Grease Games and where finishing funds are very hard to secure, the EGG community has come together to make our own rules and create our own luck.
Tim exemplifies the EGG ethos and is part of EGG’s founding story (see video above). EGG and Misfits Attic started working together in 2022 right into the industry’s post-pandemic slow-down. Like Han Solo flying through an asteroid field, Tim has continually managed to defy the odds and grow his studio’s momentum. He has used EGG’s funding to de-risk his studio with not just one… but three separate prototypes.
Below the Crown got funding from Shochiku Games coming out of EGG’s Demo Day last year and shipped to 1.0 earlier this year with a rating of 96% positive on Steam and an honorable mention for excellence in design from the IGF.
Concept art from the 3 prototypes Misfits Attic has developed: Below the Crown, Scheme and Duskers 2.0
Once again, Tim emerged from GDC and EGG’s Demo Day this year with project funding. This time for a Duskers sequel and this time from Stray Signal. Tim delivered an awesome presentation explaining his studio’s creative vision and then finished with a sneak peak of the Duskers 2.0 teaser trailer. For those who were not able to attend our event in-person, this is Tim’s presentation:
Max McGuire, co-founder of Unknown Worlds (and an investor in EGG), was in the audience for Tim’s presentation. Serendipitously, Max was in the process of launching his project fund: Stray Signal. After seeing Tim present, Max wanted Duskers 2.0 to be his fund’s first game. The deal was fully signed two weeks later.
Max is an ideal investor because his game development experience and large personal network allow him to identify and sign top talent before they’re on anyone else’s radar. He has lived through the full game entrepreneur journey himself from studio inception to acquisition. Max can empathize with founders emotionally during tough inflection points as well as provide strategic advice on how to run their studio. Spiritually, Max explained to me that Stray Signal is his way of giving back to the industry he loves.
Max is also highly technical. Natural Selection 2 was made in an engine he created from scratch, the Spark Engine, known for cutting-edge graphics with low-latency, PvP multiplayer. In Subnautica, Max pushed the limits of Unity via countless customizations inside the source code. There aren’t many technical, or game engine-related problems that Max hasn’t already solved across his career.
I’m very excited to announce that Max will be contributing to the Duskers 2.0 code base!
Max and Tim and I have known each other for nearly two decades in the SF Bay Area indie dev scene. Max and his co-founder Charlie Cleveland, used to host monthly meetups for local devs and I’ll never forget how kind and welcoming they were to everyone. Here’s a pic at the Unknown Worlds office from 2009 when I was a young, bearded indie dev at Wolfire Games.
There’s too many stories to tell for this post but it’s a small world and Max, Tim and I go way back across stories like…
In 2009, Max and his co-founder Charlie took a chance with Wolfire to run the Organic Indie Preorder Pack… a successful preorder bundle of Overgrowth and Natural Selection 2 that was in many ways a precursor to the first Humble Indie Bundle.
Later on, I helped Indie Fund Duskers and Tim helped Wolfire focus our development pipeline to complete our 1.0 launch of Overgrowth.
More recently, Tim and Max worked together directly together on Unknown Worlds’ game Moonbreaker while Tim was at Bad Robot.
Indie game development veterans like us, who started our careers circa 2008, can remember a lot of “experts” telling us the rules. In reality, a new indie renaissance had commenced, fueled by the swift rise of digital distribution. Go-to-market strategy was being completely rewritten in real-time. Our businesses felt like experimental planes that we had to build while already in the air flying them.
Instead of competing directly against AAA content, devs banded together to jam on fresh ideas that could reach their own niche audiences directly. Instead of waiting on corporate platforms for sales and promotion, developers would sell preorders on their own web sites while sharing early alpha builds via open development and then later they’d co-promote one another in bundles.
Humble Bundle was born from this era of change and innovation. Our pay-what-you-want plus charity sales brought indie devs together in a way that did not follow previous “expert-approved” conventions. Our humble platform worked in practice but not in theory (and thanks to everyone’s support Humble Bundle has now raised over $280 million for charity).
Here in 2026, we are experiencing another (and perhaps even larger) moment of change in the games industry. Many experts believe that content-focused equity funds like EGG can’t exist and that publishers and project funds are very hard to attract… especially for games in the prototype phase.
This may be true of the greater, post-pandemic, games industry but community is everything and Max and Tim and I have come together once again to forge our own path on our own terms.
Duskers is an amazing game. It won over 20 awards, earned back over 10x its original dev budget and has a 90% positive score on Steam. Rock Paper Shotgun called it “A better Alien game than any official Alien game".
The original award-winning Duskers game loop
But Duskers is a lonely and nerve-racking endeavor to survive on looted scraps in the cold void of space. Some people call it the scariest game on pc. There’s no music, just the sound of creaking derelict ships and the whir of actuators on your salvage drones. You feel so isolated while playing that you start to believe your little robots are friends who have their own unique personalities (they do not, these are just symptoms of the space madness Duskers induces in the player).
I once opened Duskers in my office at 10pm and after a continuous adrenaline high, I finally blinked and realized it was already 4am and yet I felt more awake than if I had chugged 10 cups of coffee. The survival loop is elegant and addictive but you are always just a scavenger, endlessly feeding on the husks of abandoned spaceships. Your optimal path is selfish and simple: salvage as much as you can from other ships without losing your drones. The game is perfect along this one emotional dimension.
But Tim is never one to rest on his laurels. He is always seeking to craft more meaningful experiences. He is high in empathy and EQ… prerequisites for designing at the intersection of emotion and player stories. As such, Tim frequently listens to his players. One Duskers comment in particular has been stuck in his mind for a decade:
“Duskers is like an entire ocean that’s only three feet deep.” - a person on the internet
Well person on the internet, Duskers 2.0 is for you! It’s a chance to not only save yourself but to contemplate a path for rebooting all of humanity.
Tom Hardy as Mad Max (an example of a wandering rescuer)
The player fantasy is now that of a “wandering rescuer” who at every turn must balance selfish survival with a greater moral cause. Here’s how the Duskers 2.0 nested game loops will generally work:
The new Duskers 2.0 game loops (YELLOW) will be added to the tried and true core survival loop that defined Duskers (BLUE)
If Duskers is Explore, Adapt, Survive… Duskers 2.0 is Explore, Adapt, Revive.
Do you take resources from one of your colony ships and give them to another? Do you keep the best resources for your own ship, not out of greed… but so that you can travel to more systems and rescue more people for future colonies?
Duskers 2.0 is a persistent, multi-dimensional, philosophical challenge with the emotional gravitas and emergent player stories you encounter in wildly successful titles like Frostpunk or Papers Please.
The reception to the teaser trailer has been incredibly warm and confirms Tim’s emotional design thesis.
Across the PC Gaming Show, GameTrailers, MA’s own YouTube channel and countless social media reposts, the teaser trailer has already gotten hundreds of thousands of impressions. Here are some of the comments from Misfits Attic’s YouTube channel:
EGG was founded to help amazing developers like Tim succeed. The gamer in me has always hoped for a Duskers sequel, but ambient industry conditions outside of EGG were not going to make this likely. Funding milestones like this prove EGG’s thesis and demonstrate why our community of developers (like Tim), and investors (like Max), is so very special. EGG is absolutely thrilled to be going on this journey with Misfits Attic and Stray Signal and we can’t wait to share more Duskers 2.0 news soon.
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