That's no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you'd know from the marketing, which doesn't mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.

Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?

Shhhhhh… don’t spoil their little hate party. Everyone knows that the whole marketing team really wanted to include every employee’s name in the 90 sec trailer, but Jon said, “absofuckinlutely not!”

Like a fascist would! /s

When Lance passed, it was one of the only times when I heard Blow be actually effusive about a person and their accomplishments.

He seemed very affected by his passing. You could tell how deeply he felt the loss of such talent from the world.

Jack Lance was one of the designers! https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qt...

I went back to his website [1] and spent almost an hour of a boring zoom call playing Coin Counter [2]. [1] https://jacklance.github.io/games.html [2] https://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=9ebe1e5ad44ac222593...

I didn't know of Jack Lance before this post. I've just been playing through enigmash and it's very clever! https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...

Jack Lance was, based on his output in such a short time, obviously a genius.

I see many individual games (or even just standalone puzzles, even just puns!) of his and I'm genuinely envious of how clever they are.

It hurts to think about what he could have created if he was still around.