Mad Herons Debuts Comedy RPG SEND IN THE CLOWN at The MIX

The new Los Angeles indie studio, founded by veterans of improv comedy, television, engineering and academia, is bringing its first comedy-driven RPG to players later this year.

Independent game studio Mad Herons has unveiled its debut title, SEND IN THE CLOWN, a short-form comedy RPG built around one disastrous birthday party and one very underappreciated clown.

The game debuted at The MIX indie showcase in Seattle and is expected to launch on Steam later in 2026. Players take control of Pockets, a struggling birthday entertainer who must rescue a 12-year-old’s party from chaos by solving puzzles, completing minigames, making dialogue choices and developing a collection of increasingly ridiculous clown abilities.

An Indie Game Born From the LA Comedy Scene

Mad Herons was founded by Jacques Mouledoux, Karen Park and Nick Park, whose backgrounds span television writing, engineering, academia and improv comedy. The studio describes SEND IN THE CLOWN as a two-year labour of love shaped by Los Angeles’ comedy and independent game-development communities.

The original concept emerged during Global Game Jam 2024, before Mad Herons formally existed. As development expanded, the team brought in additional creative talent, including Tyler Hutchison, director of Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator, who contributed to Pockets’ facial animations, and Courtney Vineys, whose credits include Hades and Hades II.

The project arrives at a time when smaller studios are gaining access to more advanced development tools, distribution channels and specialist support. Initiatives such as Razer Indie Lab are also helping independent teams work toward higher production standards without traditional AAA-scale resources.

Saving a Birthday Party, One Clown Skill at a Time

The premise is intentionally absurd. Pockets must save Miranda’s birthday party from her brother Tad, who has turned the event into what Mad Herons describes as a very different kind of circus.

Players gain experience by completing clown-inspired challenges, from using water-spraying flowers to dealing with questionable hot dogs. Along the way, they can befriend party guests, solve puzzles and make choices that affect how the story develops.

The game also plays with familiar genres. One sequence turns teaching a single father to dance into a rhythm-game challenge, while another uses quick-time events to give an exhausted mother a break from parenting. These side activities feed into the final RPG-style confrontation, where characters befriended earlier can join Pockets in battle.

Comedy Is the Core Design Mechanic

Rather than adding jokes to a conventional RPG structure, Mad Herons has built the game around comedy from the beginning. Its developers describe the experience as deliberately compact, with an approximate hour-long runtime that encourages repeat play and different choices.

That makes SEND IN THE CLOWN part of a wider indie-game trend where smaller studios compete through personality, tone and creative identity rather than production scale alone. For a three-person team, a distinctive voice can become a major advantage.

The developers also make one production detail very clear: according to the release, no artificial intelligence was used in the making of the game.

SEND IN THE CLOWN Is Coming to Steam

Mad Herons expects to release SEND IN THE CLOWN on Steam later in 2026. The title is currently available to wishlist ahead of launch.

Its debut at The MIX gives the young studio an early opportunity to introduce the game to the indie development community and test whether a project born from improv comedy can translate that same unpredictability into an interactive format.

About Mad Herons

Mad Herons is a three-person independent game studio founded in Los Angeles in January 2025. The team consists of former iCarly writer Jacques Mouledoux, former university professor Karen Park and former SpaceX engineer Nick Park. The founders share backgrounds in improv comedy and created the studio to develop personality-driven games with comedy at their core. SEND IN THE CLOWN is the studio’s debut title.