About the Studio
Butterscotch Shenanigans is a critically acclaimed videogame studio founded in 2012 by the three brothers: Seth Coster, Sam Coster, and Adam Coster.
Our game portfolio (Crashlands®, Levelhead®, Quadropus Rampage, Towelfight 2, Flop Rocket, and Roid Rage) collectively combine for maximum gleeful play while blurring the lines between games, stores, and devices through the data-portability of our Rumpus™ and BscotchID® web systems.
To learn more about our studio: peruse this site, play our games, listen to our comedy podcast, or view our talks, tutorials, and trailers on our YouTube channel.
To keep track of what we're up to, join our newsletters and hang out with us on Discord.
The Team
Seth Coster
Game Design & Programming
Seth was born to make video games, but everyone around him seemed to think this was a silly, impossible dream. So, for a long while, he didn't make games. Instead he studied finance, became a Certified Financial Analyst, started a joint Law/Business graduate program... and then enough was enough! After spending every available moment teaching himself to program and make games he finally quit his Master's program and started making games full time. He is now an unstoppable game-programming monster, responsible for nearly every line of code in all of our games. That stint in finance/business/law came in quite handy for starting our own company.
Sam Coster
Game Design & Art
Sam always wants to know how to do as many things as possible. This made early life frustrating, since everyone was trying to force him to choose a career path. He invited Seth to visit during a game jam (a weekend spent making a game from scratch) and the two had such a blast that Sam said, "HEY, what if we just... did this? For a job?" True to form, he wasn't worried that neither of them knew how to make games. And so, Butterscotch was born. At the time, Seth was a better programmer, so Sam said, "I guess I'll be the artist," and then spent every waking moment making art. Our classic Bscotch art style is fully Sam's doing. Sam was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2017.
Adam Coster
Productivity Engineering
Adam's love for science carried him through a PhD in Cellular & Molecular Biology. Turns out it wasn't science he was into, but solving hard problems in general. Building a company from scratch in the highly-competitive and rapidly-changing games industry certainly fit that bill, and so Adam joined the team immediately after defending his dissertation. Adam creates all of the web technology that powers our games and studio, crunches numbers to figure out how the industry works, and creates software to make sure that the team has what it needs to make great games efficiently.
Shi Chen (陈适)
Platform Specialist
Shi (pronounced like "shirt", without the "t") dreamed of making games but couldn't quite figure out how to get on that path. We met him at a local game-developer meetup and immediately liked the cut of his jib. When we opened up our first position, he applied. That position was for a "Platform Specialist", who would keep our games running as the devices and operating systems changed around us, bring our games to new markets, and add content to our existing games. In addition to the Platform Specialist role, Shi has proven indispensable for our studio's success in the growing Chinese market.
Sampada Coster
People & Studio Operations
Sampada has always been driven to excel in multiple fields. As a collegiate tennis player and national Indian tennis champion, she learned the art of organization and balancing all aspects of life. She carried these skills forward to earn a Master’s degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology, and then worked in Human Resources for 7 years while also helping Butterscotch Shenanigans get off the ground in our early years. Today, Sampada wears many hats, handling all the business operations in the company and doing industry research to ensure that the road is clear for development.
Jordan Embree
Quality Assurance Lead
Jordan has always had a passion for video games and eventually went to university to pursue a degree in video game design. During his final semester he started working with us as a part-time QA. We brought him on full-time immediately after his graduation. Jordan is now responsible for developing, executing, and improving the processes for internal testing to make sure our games meet the byzantine and sometimes-contradictory requirements set forth by our platform parters. He is the last line of defense between the stuff we make and the people who use it.
Jen Coster
Narrative Design & Game Writing
Jen always does at least one too many things at any given time. This is likely a result of her being raised in the feral wilds of libraries and consuming way too many books in her youth. Jen followed the straight and narrow path for many years, all the way through an MD and subsequent pediatrics residency, but it never felt right. Her real passion was the written word so she left medicine to pursue a career in stories. She is obsessed with narrative structure, the Oxford comma, and figuring out the why's of the stories we tell. At Butterscotch, Jen spins yarns, makes myths, and tells the most honest lies she can.
Karl Johnson
Quality Assurance
Karl has long since dreamed of doing QA as a profession, ever since his sixth-grade computer class. It took 20 years and a lot of trial and error, but after many attempts he finally broke into the industry when he was encouraged to apply with Butterscotch Shenanigans by one of his college professors. Now, four years and three states later, he is a full-time QA who is eager to fix (and break!) anything he is allowed to get his hands on at the studio, and a few things he probably shouldn't.
Anne Ballaran
Game Art
Anne is a game artist and perpetual art student who often joins the Butterscotch Shenanigans party to boost art production. She grew up on a steady diet of comics, video games, and animation, while having childhood adventures across three countries. Now working with the team remotely from the other side of the world, she lovingly creates assets and obsessively experiments with art tools in pursuit of building worlds and telling stories.