The origin of Air Hares

Captain Rabbo first appeared in the cockpit of a miniature Star Wars tabletop game ship.

Years ago, when my husband and I had first moved to Chicago and were generally broke, we’d spend our evenings drinking craft beer and playing X-Wing Miniatures. One time, when I was crushing him, he started joking about Rabbo (my nickname) helming the spaceship, and that evolved into a vision of an actual rabbit wearing flight goggles sitting in the pilot seat. We found it hilarious.

We kept talking about how she would fly the plane without opposable thumbs (don’t worry about it), how a little bunny became a pilot in the first place, what’s her backstory? We started building a mythology and a personality for Captain Rabbo, just for fun.

A few years later, my husband, Tim, had graduated with his MFA in Writing from the School for the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was THISCLOSE to signing a publishing deal for an epic poetry book he’d pitched about an extremely popular video game character and their legendary adventures.

Like, he’d signed NDAs and submitted a direct deposit form.

But ultimately, after many rounds of approvals, the overseas parent company of the video game franchise said “not right now,” and it fell through.

It was, in a word, devastating.

That’s when Tim decided his next creative project would be completely original IP, something that wouldn’t require the approval of a giant entertainment conglomerate.

Something that no one else could say “no” to.

So we turned back to Captain Rabbo. Tim joined an indie video game meetup and began building out the world and the game mechanics. He wrote a script for a comic book about her and we settled on the name “Air Hares.” We were both working full-time jobs, spending our free time scheming about the game.

We were also trying to get pregnant, and it wasn’t working. A very long and painful story short: my Fallopian tubes were blocked, so I had surgery to remove them, then we moved on to IVF. During the height of the Covid pandemic.

We also adopted our dog, Arthur, and modeled the character Dirk Doggo after him.

Everything going on in our lives made its way into the game. By fall of 2020, we had completed two rounds of egg retrievals, and we had a full game design doc, three comic book scripts, original music, talented artists and programmers lined up, and a PC game demo.

We launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised about $6,000, mostly from our family and friends, to accelerate the game development. All the while, we’re injecting me with hormones and going for walks with Arthur, chatting about our future children and our future video game.

Air Hares isn’t about infertility, but it’s heavily inspired by our experience of infertility. It’s a retro-style top-down on-rails non-violent shooter game in which you play as a bunny in an airplane, seeding and watering your carrot crop while dodging falcon goons.

But at its core, it’s a story about turning to technology and hope when nature fails us. It’s about keeping the faith, but doing something about your fate.

We faced two unsuccessful embryo transfers, another round of difficult tests, me breaking my leg (!), another egg retrieval, and finally one more embryo transfer before our son was born in 2022. All that time, we kept going with Air Hares.

Earlier this week, we announced our partnership with publisher indie.io to bring Air Hares to PC gamers on Steam later this year, and we plan to release it on Switch and mobile in 2026.

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From concept to publication, this game has been nearly a decade in the making.

The nitty gritty: how we did it

That’s the story, but how did two non-programmers pull this off, you may ask? A lot of help.

1. The talent 🎨 We’ve hired freelance artists and programmers from around the world to help bring Air Hares to life. My husband is the developer and producer of Air Hares, but we’ve also worked with music composers, graphic artists, pixel artists, comic artists, colorists, and game programmers.

2. The money 💰 This has been partially funded by our Kickstarter money, but the majority of the funding has come straight from our pockets, which is part of the reason why it’s taken so long! A very rough ballpark of the cost: $30-40K.

3. The marketing 📣 While Tim runs the production side, I run the marketing side: creating and maintaining our website, social media, PR, etc etc etc. I’m like the one-woman-band marketing director described in those nightmare job descriptions from companies who expect a single person to fulfill 18 different roles, except I don’t get paid for it!

4. The drive ⛽️ We’ve always said that we’re making Air Hares for our family and for our kids. We’re making it because we want to see it out in the world and share it with people. That’s the motivation. Yeah, we’d love to make our money back! And maybe even turn a profit! But that’s never been the driving force behind it, which is good, because making a lot of money from an indie video game is tough.

It also helps to have done our Kickstarter campaign — not just because the funding was vital to get us off the ground, but because we’re accountable to our Bunny Backers.

It might have taken longer than we’d planned, but we’ve proudly delivered the first full-color, 50-page issue of the comic book and an alpha version of the PC game to all of our backers (and they’ll get the official game when it’s released, too).

The difference between a passion project and a side hustle

Air Hares is not a side hustle, because that implies it’s something we do outside our regular jobs to make extra income. And as I said, that’s not why we’re doing it.

We genuinely hope that Air Hares will be a commercial success, and will be working hard with our partners at indie.io to make that a reality.

But if we saw it purely as a way to make extra cash, we would have abadoned it long ago.

Your passion project doesn’t have to cost you ANY money — we just happened to land on something that requires a lot of talent and resources to pull off.

If you’re a creative professional like my husband and me, having a passion project isn’t just about doing something that might make money in the future.

It’s about doing something that doesn’t require anyone else’s approval. It’s about being the artist AND the decision maker. It’s about not needing 11 rounds of corporate approval to get something published. It’s about creating something because we simply MUST.

It’s about watching our 3-year-old son play a video game that we made for him before he was even born, because we knew he was waiting for us, and we’d have to fight to get him here, just like Captain Rabbo fights for her Air Hares. 🐰🥕✈️

More about Air Hares

You can find lots of fun stuff on our website, follow us on Instagram, and wishlist the game on Steam!

Up next on Sleight of Brand!

Thanks for reading this edition! I asked some of my LinkedIn pals what they wanted from my next newsletter, and this topic won out.

Next up: How to help people in your network who have been laid off, specifically, from someone who knows 🫠

After that: Why I’m loving working for myself as a solopreneur & signs that you might like it, too (or not!) 👩🏻‍💼

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