About .dstwre/

.dstwre/ is my umbrella project, or dev label. It's pronounced dustware.

The stylization is part of the idea. Written as .dstwre/, it's a hidden directory that not many people will ever come across.
The domain, dstwre.sh follows a similar logic. It reads a bit like something you would execute from a shell.

I had this whole thing in my head for a while. The idea was to make games, websites and other pieces that are part of one large universe that feel like something you may have played or found years ago and then somehow forgot about. Something dusty, left behind, made with actual care.

That is also why dstwre exists both in-universe and outside of it. It is part of the fiction, but it is also the real interface through which I build and publish all of this.

Where it came from

I came up with the idea of .dstwre/ around the time i stopped smoking and started listening to Halley Labs a lot.

That combined effect of detoxing and listening to her music which was so focused around artistic freedom and selfmade-stuff moved something inside me. i had always wanted to do something like this, but i never really managed to push through and actually build it.

The intention behind .dstwre/ is that I want to tell stories through games and other software within an explicitly created coherent universe. I want people to be moved by my works. but in a way that leaves something behind. Emptiness, inner conflict, questions. The feeling that keeps sitting somewhere at the back of your head after you are done.

The reasaon behind the name

With .dstwre/, I want you to think of old N64, Rare or PS1-era games first. Not just visually, but emotionally. Games that maybe were never the biggest thing in the world, but were clearly made with love, taste and intent. Classics to someone, forgotten to almost everyone else.

The "dust" in .dstwre/ mainly stands for decay and forgotten media. It is stylized, yes, but also kind of literal. I am not planning to do big releases or optimizing everything for reach. So chances are that some, or even most of these projects will only ever be seen by a small amount of people and then start collecting dust.

The feel I am after

The feeling of a .dstwre/ project is to be abstract, stylized, rough. Maybe even somewhat unhinged at times since older games had that type of quality a lot more often. They were not always trying to smooth everything over.

I want that strange feeling some works leave behind when they really get through to you. Inner conflict. Emptiness. Questions. The kind of feeling where, after finishing something, you just sit thinking about what you've witnessed.

Aesthetic influences are obviously things like PS1-era visuals, rough textures, ambiguity, pacing, and sometimes even difficulty. But those are really just the outer shell. The actual topics inside the games tend to revolve much more around philosophical or psychological issues and dilemmas.

Old shell, modern core

A big part of .dstwre/ is the contrast between old visuals and modern internals.

I want these things to look like forgotten software, but I do not want to actually be trapped by old limitations. So the idea is to keep the feel, while using modern tools under the hood to do things that would not have been possible back then, or at least not in the same way.

This website is an example of this as it is still responsive, extendable, and backed by a custom CMS yet looks dated but also somewhat modern again with the layout. The same applies to the games: modern engine, fewer hard technical limits, but used in a way that preserves the older feel.

Why the website is selfmade

I have always been more of a DIY person. I like building my own workflows. I like getting into things I do not fully understand yet and learning by working through them. That is usually where the most interesting stuff happens.

I also work full time in web development, where I got used to existing systems and all the abstraction that comes with them. Building my own CMS was partly a way to understand those inner workings better by doing them myself.

That CMS, this site, and the surrounding tools are therefore not just support structures. They are part of the project too.

Principles

This whole project is basically centered around the themes of DIY, self-direction, source-open and a pretty clear anti-capitalist stance.

Everything I make should remain accessible and freely shareable in some form, which is also why I wrote my own license. That is less about pretending I invented a better legal system and more about making a statement about how I want this work to exist.