Holiday wishes, some news & Luna🎄

Hello,
I’ll try to be brief as I am sure you have heaps of holiday treats to get to, but allow me to thank you for being with Charles Games for another year!

Whether it’s here, on our social media, our Discord or in-person, we feel truly blessed to have people who like what we do. ❤️

So, from the bottom of our gamedev hearts:

🎄We hope you’ll have a great rest of 2025 and will start 2026 in the best possible way.

By the way, the dog in the picture is called Luna! 🌕 She’s the best friend of Anna from We Grew Up in War, a beloved grandma’s companion who is there when Anna learns about the real reason her parents just left their home with her.

It’s all still work in progress, but we couldn’t keep these images of Luna from you.

In the game, you’ll meet Luna on several occasions, playing fetch with her:

But also playing as her, jumping in one of the fantasy scenes that show how kids make sense of their circumstances with the help of imagination:

The Luna segments are emblematic of how we approach kids’ experience of war, blending reality and fantasy to show how vital it is for kids to cope with the things around them.

You could’ve seen something similar in our demo, in the scene where Matej’s drawings come alive, all the while listening to his mum talk about devastating news. You did play the demo, no? No? You still can! Leave a review.

And now for a few quick updates:

🎁 Last minute gift idea: Attentat & Svoboda for $4 (exclusive coupon)

Thinking hard about that one uncle you want to give a gift to, but can’t figure out what? We just might have a solution! What about giving our award-winning history games for a mere four dollars?

Head over to a very secret coupon page on Itch.io, to get both for an unprecedentedly low price: Limited to 5 purchases in total and expiring on December 31st:

👉 https://charlesgames.itch.io/holidays2025

 🎨 Jitka (re-)joins Charles Games alongside Johan

Do you remember Beecarbonize? The majority of cards were drawn by Jitka. And we are more than happy that she has now become a part of our team as a 3D/2D artist!

You’ve already seen some of her work above, but be assured that more is to come. Including our yet-unannounced projects that are well underway. While you wait, you might take a look at a demo of Jitka’s very own game Flowerized (still under development).

But what’s, perhaps, arguably, as important as Jitka’s arrival is that our studio is blessed by visits of yet another dog: this time it’s Johan. A three-year-old mix of what Jitka guesses are “labrador, pointer and a shepherd breeds” he is very energetic, protective and joyful.

I figured it’s best to end our last newsletter of 2025 with a sort of (un)serious rewind list of things that happened in our studio and in our lives. So, in 2025:

• we celebrated our fifth birthday,

• we moved into a new office full of plants,

• Lukáš made a first batch of his homemade Sriracha,

• we released Playing Prague with great reviews, later winning CEEGA with it,

• we won our first Reboot Develop Indie Game Award with We Grew Up in War,

• Tereza travelled to our favorite Blon festival,

• some of us had their first kids,

• Ondřej played a lot of Citizen Sleeper 2 in a hospital,

• we released our new demo after quite a while, for We Grew Up in War,

• the number of PhDs in our studio rose by one (to 3)

Also, if your looking for something to play over Christmas, we have some tips, but take them with a grain of salt as we will be playing them for the first time, too (but they are supposed to be very good): Despelote, Consume Me, Outer Wilds – Echoes of the Eye DLC and Winter Burrow.

And that is really all!

Thank you for reading our humble newsletter and see you in 2026.

For all of us at Charles Games, wishing you the best,
Ondřej