About Us
Fourfold is a small studio. We make games and electronic hardware, and we like the projects where the two meet: a conference badge that's also a game, or a game you hold in your hand.
The Team
Jay Margalus
Jay runs Fourfold and hosts This Should Work*, a podcast about making, technology, and education. He's the Johnson Professor of Entrepreneurship and Leadership at Washington and Lee University. Before that he taught game design and industrial design at DePaul, where he directed the Idea Realization Lab.
Bobby Schweizer
Bobby is a game designer and scholar who writes about theme parks, play, and how games shape the spaces around them. He co-wrote Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press) with Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari. His next book, The Bitsy Book, teaches first-time game makers to tell stories with games.
Rudy Ristich
Rudy is a hardware hacker with more than a decade in embedded systems. He was building THOTCON badges years before Fourfold existed, and Jay started out helping on his. The two of them have also co-founded makerspaces together.
What we've made
The Fourfold (in development)
A game console you talk to. Say what you want to play and it builds the game. Working prototype.
Delve Deeper
A turn-based adventure and strategy game for up to four players, on Steam.
THOTCON 0xD badge
2,000 ESP32 badges with a screen and a capacitive touch wheel, shipped in six months in 2025.
Five earlier THOTCON badges
A maze you play with three knobs, a key that mines its own currency, a badge that talks, and laser tag for a whole conference.
Open firmware
Badge firmware published on GitHub so attendees can keep building after the event.
What we're good at
Hardware
- Circuit board design and manufacturing
- Embedded firmware for ESP32 and AVR chips
- Capacitive touch, displays, LEDs, and sound
- Enclosures in acrylic and molded plastic
Software
- Game design and development
- Networked devices: Wi-Fi, MQTT, over-the-air updates
- Web applications
- Interface design for small screens