This Game Development Company Transformed Remote Collaboration With Pumble

Running a distributed team offers flexibility, but without the right tools and structure, it can lead to miscommunication, misaligned work, and lost momentum.

For Ryan Vandendyck, founder of Eden Industries, an indie game development company based in Canada, these were the exact challenges his growing remote team faced.

What started as a solo project in Ryan’s basement has grown into a globally distributed team of over 20 people. They work across programming, art, design, writing, and sound — all without a central office.

As the studio scaled from a solo project to a full team, they needed a centralized, affordable solution to keep everyone connected and organized.

The turning point came when they adopted Pumble — a business messaging app that gave the team clear communication, unlimited messaging history, and the structure they needed to build games efficiently.

Challenges Eden Industries faced

Like many indie studios, Eden Industries grew from a one-person passion project into a full-fledged team. And, like many remote teams, they ran into serious collaboration issues along the way.

Developing video games takes time — often years — and when your team is spread across time zones and disciplines, staying aligned becomes a daily challenge.

Communication became the bottleneck. Without clear systems in place, ideas got lost, feedback was missed, and momentum suffered.

That’s when it became clear that they needed more than just messaging — they needed structure, reliability, and visibility.

Here are some of the challenges Eden Industries faced:

• Slow, disorganized communication — Early on, the team relied on tools like Skype and email. But these platforms weren’t designed for long-term, collaborative game development. Messages were hard to organize, conversations overlapped, and finding old decisions was nearly impossible.
• No access to important information — As projects dragged on, Ryan realized that critical decisions made months ago were becoming harder to retrieve. Tools with message history limits or poor search functionality meant that the team often had to redo discussion or hunt through files, wasting valuable time and energy.
• Misalignment in a fully remote environment — When your entire team works remotely, you can’t rely on casual conversations or quick check-ins over coffee to clarify tasks. Without real-time context, small miscommunications grew into big delays.
• Communication tools were limiting for their growing team — As Eden Industries grew, their existing communication tools started breaking down. Slack’s free plan couldn’t keep up, and the paid version became expensive quickly — especially for a company trying to stay low on costs and focused on development.

These communication issues didn’t just cause frustration — they directly slowed down production and made it harder to deliver the kind of quality games Eden is known for. Something had to change.

How Eden Industries found Pumble and why they switched

To solve these problems, Eden Industries started searching for a communication platform built for distributed teams — one that didn’t compromise on usability, quality, or cost.

That’s when Ryan’s art director found Pumble:

“It looked a lot like Slack — so we wouldn’t have to relearn how to use it — but it had a more sustainable pricing model and no messaging history limits.”

The fact that Pumble was built by CAKE.com, the same team behind Clockify, a popular time-tracking tool, gave Ryan the confidence to try it:

“It’s by the team that made Clockify, which was very well regarded. We didn’t actually use it, but we saw that people really love this thing. It’s well regarded, the team has a good pedigree, so we like that.”

After testing it with their team, they made the switch and never looked back.

Ryan pointed out that the simplicity and ease of use was what made them choose Pumble and stay loyal to it:

“The thing I want most from a chat app is just — chat. And, some of these other tools, it just feels like they’re focusing on so many supplementary things that they’re losing the point of why I wanted them. Pumble makes chatting with people, in groups and threads, just easy. That’s what I want. I don’t need the crazy supplements, I just need it to do the core thing. And so, that’s what I like about Pumble — It’s focused, it does what it sets out to do well.”

How Pumble took Eden Industries’ communication to the next level

Pumble quickly became Eden Industries’ central communication hub, helping them overcome long-standing problems and collaborate better across time zones, projects, and teams.

Here’s how Pumble helped their team.

Unlimited messaging history for easy access

Pumble’s unlimited messaging history was one of the first things the team noticed and appreciated.

With the slower pace of game projects, feedback, notes and decisions from months ago still matter. Losing access to these discussions can derail production.

This was a big problem while they were still using Slack:

“When we first started using Slack, there were 2 or 3 of us, and it wasn’t that bad because we could look back at messages from months and months ago, almost a year I think. But then, things were picking up, I was hiring a lot of people. It was a month, and that was all the message history we had.”

As they grew, the limits that Slack put on their team was too much to bear:

“So as we grew, it actually became a worse and worse fit, which is not really what you want your tools to do. You want them to grow with you, not restrict you as you grow.”

That’s why Pumble’s unlimited message history has brought Ryan peace of mind:

“I’m not paranoid about losing message history anymore. So, I know if I talked to my art director about something 6 months ago, I can just go find it. It’s made me a lot less stressed about forgetting or losing access to the decisions we’ve made, the plans we’ve made.”

Unlike Slack, Pumble keeps every message, even on the free plan, making it easy to find past information without having to pay extra.

Channels and threads to keep communication organized

Before Pumble, managing conversations was messy.

Skype lacked threads and Slack’s limitations made it harder to separate discussions by topic or team:

“You need a way to organize the different kinds of lines of communication, and this is where, for us, Skype started to get really hard to navigate as we were adding more people. There are no threads in Skype, and they kind of layer the group chat, which makes it really hard to keep track of who was in what conversation and what we talked about.”

Pumble gave the team structure. With public and private channels, threads, and DMs, Eden Industries can keep every part of the project in its place — and everyone in the loop.

Simplicity and ease of use to focus on the important things

Unlike other platforms that pile on features and complexity, Pumble sticks to the essentials — and does them well.

For Ryan and his team, that simplicity is a big part of what makes it so effective:

“What Pumble did was what a good communication tool should do — allow you to focus on the work, not the tool itself. So, that’s what it did — it kinda faded into the background, so I don’t have to worry about all these little things. It just lets me get down to business.”

Connect with your team and stay focused on the right things with Pumble

If your remote team is growing and you're tired of clunky tools that slow you down, plus eat away at your budget — try Pumble.

For Ryan and his team at Eden Industries, it was a game-changer. It helped them:

• Stay organized across long development cycles,
• Communicate clearly across time zones,
• Keep access to every conversation, forever, and
• Avoid the steep pricing of other platforms.

As Ryan summarized it, anyone who does any collaborative work can benefit from using Pumble:

“I’d literally recommend it to anyone collaborating on anything, especially if you already know Slack, and I think most people, at this point, do. There’s no reason not to switch in my mind. You know, there are some pros and cons of both. But, on the whole, Pumble is way better, and it has similar features, so I’d recommend it to everybody.”

If your team needs a straightforward, easy way to communicate, Pumble might be just the right fit.