My Return to Game Dev

Once in a while I get an email from someone who enjoyed a game of mine. They usually don’t lead with that, no, they tell me about a bug, or ask a question, or offer “game services” I might want. But if I engage with them, then the truth is usually revealed after one or two emails: they discovered me one day, played a few of my multiplayer games with friends or their kids, had a great time, thus decided to email me.

This is the only moment that I ever hear about this. All the other days, weeks, months, I might hear nothing at all about my games. They might have been downloaded another 500 times, I might somehow discover a review someone wrote about my silly little game (in German :p), but I get no feedback, no personal responses, no confirmation that anyone is playing my games.

Partially, the blame falls on me. I hop around between completely different projects and even creative domains, so much so that nobody—including myself—can even follow what I do. I therefore don’t have time for marketing, I don’t have any community (because I don’t stay inside the same spaces for longer than a few weeks), and I certainly won’t do any shady practices to gather statistics or force people to sign up for a newsletter or whatever.

But most of all, this is just the way the world works. You can pour your heart and soul into a video game, and you will only hear something if there’s a bug or people are angry at you for some silly little mistake somewhere. You can spend months working on something, only for it to suddenly not work on very specific devices/systems, only for a similar idea to be done better by some big studio in the meantime. And then if you stay disciplined and miraculously don’t give up, you can expect … silence.

I had to find out, years later and through serendipitous email exchanges, that loooads of people were playing a certain game of mine and loved it. I had no clue! I couldn’t know! Nobody told me anything! All I got was silence and an empty bank account.

Once I had more than enough experience creating smaller games, I started some bigger projects. “Commercial releases”. Things I might put on steam and that might sell for 10–20 euros.

I finished those projects … for 95% :p I am serious here; this is not a hopeful overestimation. They are so so almost done. Then why didn’t I finish them back then?

A few unfortunate events coincided.

I had to return to university to finish my degree. Yes, I’d also managed to complete 95% of my bachelor’s degree, and now had to come back for two stupid grades and a signature on a worthless piece of paper. It is no secret that I despise the educational system and every moment I had to spend in it, so this was a big downer for me and took all my time and energy to struggle through. (But if I didn’t do it, my student debt would be tripled, and I might forever feel guilty about the sunk cost.)
My hardware deteriorated. I write this article on a 10+ year old laptop that was never made to create games (in any way, shape or form) in the first place. I am lucky if I can type a few words without considerably delay, or a key misfiring and suddenly typing the same letter thrice. At some point, it was just too painful and slow to work on any game-related thing.
I was done with the years of silence. At this point, I had no clue anybody even played my games, and no confirmation I was doing anything of any value. The only things I heard were bug reports or people angry about a game, and often they were right because I simple screwed it up and hastily threw something together. (Some of my games are now on Poki, for example, which is ample confirmation and an income stream. But this happened later, when I had finished my degree. I almost won some game jams in the mean time, I’ve been in contact with other major web game websites, but that all happened months/years after these events.)

So I quit. I stopped making video games entirely for several years, without exception. Not even tiny prototypes, because even those my laptop couldn’t handle.

That’s why, the past few years, my number of board games has exploded. That’s why I mostly wrote novels and tried to supplement my income from that. (“Supplement” is doing some heavy lifting here—I basically have no income and any cash thrown my way is a miracle.)

But game dev is a weird place. The duality of game dev is that everyone hates it and notices how hard and soul-crushing it is—and yet we keep coming back. Everyone is sick of looking at a screen and playing their own game by the end of development, but after a short break we dive in again.

I am no different. I flip-flop between despising video game development and never wanting to write stupid code again, and then having new great ideas and working for 12 hours to get some cool thing happening on the screen. After years of being away from video game development, my brain was overflowing with ideas for video games and itching to work on them again.

This time, however, I knew I needed a plan. I couldn’t just dive in head-first again on my new shiny idea of that day. Partially because shiny ideas often end up not being so shiny anymore once you’ve had a few days to think about them; partially because I now know how much effort such ideas take and I’m too old now to waste time.

In this article, I want to quickly explain the plan, the reasoning behind it, and thus what you can expect from me in the coming years (in the realm of video game development).

I am a weird developer

I rarely play singleplayer games. I rarely play online multiplayer; in fact, my Wi-Fi is off for most of the day, on all my devices. If I play a game, it’s a board game or a local multiplayer video game. (Well, most likely I’ll try to find someone to play a physical sport first :p But not many people are available for spontaneously playing table tennis for an hour, weirdly enough.)

To me, games are most valuable as a social shared experience, being in the same room with others and physically sharing that event.

I tried to make more “sellable” games. I created several puzzle games, several singleplayer action games, you name it.

And they were more sellable. I actually earned my first 100 dollars on those games. I got more views, more downloads, more comments, than my local multiplayer games. Even though I think those games were far worse, because my heart clearly wasn’t in it. I was making something I would probably never play myself; I was making something purely based on what others said they found fun.

After all this time, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am just a very weird game developer. Weird background, weird personality, weird views on games. There’s no use trying to be different—in fact, the wise move here would be to call it my strength and unique selling point.

I make small local multiplayer games. The games might have singleplayer, but that’s a sidenote. I’ve dabbled with online multiplayer and might add some of that to a game (if big enough/time and funds provide), but it’s very low on the list of priorities.

I’ve come to accept that this will always severely narrow my audience and my prospects of making game dev commercially viable. As such, I won’t even try it.

I am not ditching my other projects for game dev. I am not giving it my all for some “dream game” or “big release” that is supposed to be my income. Due to my weird setup and approach as a developer, this is so unlikely as to be negligible.

No, the “dream” here is really to just get out a party game that people can enjoy on the couch together, or parents can enjoy with their kids, every once in a while. That’s it. Money irrelevant, success irrelevant, it’s not my “main job”. As such, whenever priorities clash or a decision must be made, I will choose to place my video game development lower on the ladder of priorities.

Years ago, while busy making all those games, I also tried to upload devlog videos. I tried to be active in certain channels, promote myself, post on Twitter, you know the deal—and you also know it just doesn’t work for most people. Especially not if you hate doing it and already feel like you’re just wasting time.

I have two games where I said “ignore the game, let’s focus mostly on marketing”.

I hated the entire development of that game.
The games themselves ended up worse than my other games, and at least worse than they could have been.
All that extra marketing did boost their sales, but only by enough to buy a few books or a new keyboard, nothing more.

So no, I will just completely ignore marketing to a laughable extent. I won’t even lie and say I think my game is amazing and you should play it. I won’t jump through any hoops, do any tricks, or try tacky tactics just to get more visibility here. I will not come anywhere near it, and I will do that in the full knowledge that this will mostly ruin my chances of getting any income from the game.

I am but one imperfect man

When I was younger, I wanted to learn everything. And I truly gave it my best shot. I think I am more than decent in many creative areas, which obviously includes the areas needed for game development, after years of trying and training and challenging myself.

I was terrible at art in high school, to the point my teacher seemed to absolutely hate me and sighed whenever she had to look at my failed attempt at drawing something. Nowadays I know all my projects look at least “okay”, and when I enter game jams, the art will regularly be the most complimented aspect of the game.

I was a very messy and unfocused programmer at first. That’s just what a hyperactive teenage brain does. But now my code is incredibly clean, I’ve seen so many algorithms and structures and architectures that I can often immediately find a clean solution for something.

And so I tried to do everything myself. On those big projects (95% finished), there isn’t a SINGLE part, not even a fucking LINE OF CODE, that comes from another source. I made it all myself. No AI, no open source stuff, no free assets, no helpful plugins, nothing. I modeled, I painted, I made sound effects with my mouth or my guitar, etcetera.

But this is folly.

I can’t expect to finish games in a reasonable timeframe if I want to do 100% myself. I can’t expect my attempt at illustration to be better than one from someone who actually has 30 years of art experience and is fully dedicated to it. I am your typical “idea guy” who has ideas faster than he can make them, so any delay in making the ideas—such as spending months polishing a game by doing all the art and UI myself—is bad for my health and motivation.

No, I’ve accepted that this just wasn’t working.

I will keep my games small. Not in the sense of “oh I’ll only make hypercasual games”, but in the sense of “every choice I make will be one to achieve minimalism and shortcuts that help me be more efficient”.
I will start using whatever assets are available to me. (Such as free and open source ones, but I also have paid assets from other sources, such as a competition I once won which gave a sound effects pack as a prize.)
I will accept that plugins, extensions, work by others, will have to be included in my final games. Because it’s probably faster and more battle-tasted than if I’d tried to do it all myself.

Pretty much every game is just a new combination of existing mechanics/ideas/graphics that have been done millions of times before. There’s just no use redoing it all every time, especially not redoing it yourself. I’ve done that enough times to learn whatever lessons that might give; I am now at a stage where I only care about getting a fun end product out into the world once in a while.

I am hyperactive and easily bored

This is, again, something I thought I could challenge or soften with the right habits or mind-set. But no, that was the wrong approach.

My hyperactive brain allows me to be very productive and creative. It always thinks about a million possibilities, it can make loads of interesting connections, and it’s always thinking ahead a million steps.

That’s nice! But it also means that my brain will have “grown tired of” or “overthought” any idea pretty quickly. While I am constricted to “slow process”, limited by what my hands and computer can physically do in a day, my brain is already 10 days into the future thinking about that other mechanic I need to code.

This means that any idea, no matter how excited I am by it, no matter how promising, will be boring and dead to me after a few weeks. Yes, a few weeks. Yes, dead.

By the time I’ve finished a book and give its proof copy to someone else, I care not even a single bit about that book, what they think, or anything related to it. I just don’t. I’ve done my bit, I’ve created the thing by working full-time on it for several weeks, and now it’s time to move on or my brain starts complaining heavily.

In fact, my novels are on a two-week cycle. I haven’t taken longer than 2 weeks to write a book in a few years now. At most, it’s extended to 3 weeks because of revisions, cover art, things that get in the way. This is by choice. I will do whatever is necessary to make this deadline, because I know I will be too bored to continue work on the project if it drags on for 4 weeks or longer.

Again, I’ve tried to combat this. Surely it’s a discipline issue, right? Surely I must just power through? Nope, nope, nope. I’ve done countless projects that went on for many weeks, months, or even longer. All of them stopped being fun, stopped having any meaningful progress, stopped meaning anything to me after a few weeks.

So no, it’s not something to be removed or thought of as a weakness. I should simply design/pick my projects to work with it.

Any games I make will be easily “chunked” into smaller mini-games or sections, like chapters in a book or subgames. This way, I can achieve those smaller goals on a 2-week cycle, which works great for me.
If a game seems to take longer, I scale down. I cut whatever is needed to make the deadline. Even if that means a worse game—because a slightly worse game with less content is better than no game at all.

Because that’s what happened to those “95% finished games”. I forced myself to keep working on them after 2–3 weeks, even while completely demotivated and uninterested. And so it took a month or two to get them to a playable and publishable state. But just before the finish line I was SO FUCKING DONE with those games, that I just couldn’t bear the thought of working on them for another day.

I should’ve downsized, cut, destroyed those games until I could publish them after 3 or 4 weeks. If that wasn’t possible, I should’ve overhauled the game design to cut it into little chapters or mini-games for me to work on.

Because now, for years, those games have been sitting on my hard drive unfinished and unpublished. And even now, I fear this might always stay that way.

Say it with me: “Your body of work is only as large as your finished, published games.”

If I make games for people, then I should involve people

Finally, my focus on getting better, challenging myself and powering through made my game dev journey very individual and solistic. As stated, I am no part of any community, not affiliated with anything, have no friends in the business.

Similarly, I only tried to set up playtests (with friends, family or strangers) once every few months. When I’d done “major changes” to the game. After I’d spent weeks coding really tough systems, redoing all the art, etcetera. Because, well, otherwise the changes would just be too small and testing again would be a waste of everyone’s time!

After every playtest, I would completely rip apart the internals and start rebuilding the game differently. And that takes time, so I often couldn’t even playtest the game the next few weeks. (Once I tried to do it anyway, telling myself that I should playtest more, and the consequences were exactly as you’d expect: the game was completely broken and the playtest was meaningless, because I’d ripped out so much and left so many things in an in-between state.)

Instead, and this is related to the previous points, I should just …

Make sure the game is always in a playable state. Again, make hard decisions and cut good ideas if needed to accomplish this.
Preferably, playtest on that same 1-week or 2-week cycle. (“Spend 1 week creating a new chunk of the game, test by weekend.”)
Don’t be afraid that it’s not good enough, or too little has changed, or people will steal ideas, or whatever. Just instantly share what I have, try to involve others, get actual people playing my local multiplayer game.

This is hard, however, when it’s not your “main job”. I might not have any time to work on a game for a month. (As I write a novel or meet other “more important” deadlines.) Then it’s silly to have the routine of playtesting every weekend … or is it?

After all those years, I actually think the answer is to still playtest. It’s that important. So many new things can come to light, even if the build is identical to the previous one.

Playtests don’t need to be these 2-hour long sessions where everybody has to be engaged all the time. Of course people are unlikely to say yes to that! Of course they don’t always have the time or attention for it.

When I did my many game jams this summer, I often sneak-tested a game for just 10 minutes. Grab someone nearby, let them play the game, it probably crashes after 10 minutes anyway because of a stupid game, and done. They continue with their day; I have 15 new things that would really improve that experience.

As such, any game I make should be “sneak-testable”. If you need a lot of setup, or longer gameplay, or loads of menus to get through … that’s not gonna work.

I shall make decisions and understand people are weird

Most of my games in the past hovered in some sort of vague mid-range. Too much polish and work to put them out for free, too little to ask any real price. Too serious to just be a little bit of fun, but too silly and half-baked to be a serious game.

Instead, for every game project, I should decide beforehand which it is.

Is this a tiny web game I’ll release on itch.io and move on?
Or is this more?

And if it’s more, I should set a price.

People are weird about this. If you ask money for something, they will think it has more value and actually think it’s better and be more likely to pay for it. If you make it free, people perceive it as lacking value and will also subconsciously think worse of it and try less to understand the game or really engage with it.

This is a studied and proven phenomenon, but I’ve also noticed this myself my entire life. I’ve thrown random price tags on projects and people have perceived them as more valuable and actually bought them. Even when I honestly and clearly tell them it’s a random price tag and I actually don’t think the project is better than some of my free stuff. They’ll come up with all sorts of weird brain wrinkles and reasonings for why it is worth that price and it is better.

As such, I went through my itch dashboard and made most games paid. Just 1 or 2 dollars. To set an example and a baseline; not because I expect anyone will pay it or they’re worth that.

I don’t care about money, like many artists, but we live in a society where you need a bit of it to survive. And a society that has devalued art to a comical extent. And yes, we somewhat do this to ourselves. I contribute to the idea that games should be free that lives inside the heads of all kids/teenagers by making all my games free.

As such, I’ll clearly pick if a project is “free small fun” or “paid big thing” at the start, and then stick to it. And I’ll mostly lean towards the second one, because, well, I’ve done the first one for 10 years now.

And so I present: the path forward

This summer, I participated in loads of game jams. It got the creative juices flowing again, got me back into the habit of game dev, sparked some new ideas and taught me even cleaner ways to create projects in Godot game engine.

(I submitted 8 games in a span of 3 weeks. My best placement was 5th out of ~250, my worst was 50th out of ~75. Most feedback was very positive and enjoyed the game, while their criticisms were almost exclusively focused on game design and interesting rules or annoyances I hadn’t considered. That’s a good sign, because game design rules everything else, and I think it’s the one thing you should always try to become better at. Good art or code doesn’t matter if the core rules of your game, which the player repeats over and over, are whacky.)

Despite being extremely tiring and another pile of work, it was a good “warm up” and “get back into the groove”.

Also slightly demotivating, of course, to get more confirmation again that local multiplayer games are just not played or even considered by many, and all your immense hard work will still give you no better than top 20% in a small jam :p But I try not to get demotivated by that.)

Let’s call it a “reality check” instead. I’ve seen (again) how much time things cost, what kinds of mechanics are doable and which are just too hard or not fun, how I should or shouldn’t approach game dev to stay healthy.

I did all this on a whacky setup, because I still don’t have a proper working environment or hardware. (It’s an old tablet—though certainly less old than my laptop—connected to external keyboard, mouse and monitor, because all those things don’t work on the tablet itself anymore.) But the setup is just functional enough and I don’t expect it to break or become slow/impossible again in the near future.

This gave me the following path forward.

Fall and Winter of 2024

I have loads of novels to write and board games to make. Actual deadlines, long in the making, the hope of some income, so those come first. (Also, remember my entire story about boredom and the 2-week cycle. Board games are quicker to make than video games, so I’ll prefer them in most cases.)

But I have a collection of ideas for winter-related (ice/snow) games. I’ll try to get one of them out the door in the Winter, as a paid local multiplayer release on Itch.io.

There are also a few more big game jams that I can use to get some tiny games going again in the mean-time.

I wrote down the idea of creating a lot of tiny web games and adding them to Pandaqi. I even made the first 4 or 5 of them. But, as I stated before, these were singleplayer (“hypercasual”) games … and I don’t actually play those or care about them. So why make them? It was nice to get a bit more practice, but I don’t feel very motivated to actually make them and create some sort of “web game portal” on Pandaqi.com.

I’d already planned to release the first few web games on that portal by now … and the fact you can’t find them yet on Pandaqi, tells you enough :p I just don’t feel it’s the right approach. It would just lead to more burnout by me, as I focus on creating way too many tiny games that I wouldn’t even play myself. (Or, even worse, overscope those as well and end up working many weeks on what should’ve been a Sunday evening project.)

Spring 2025

I will finish that first game that was 95% done. Finish means it is playable and bug-free, not that it’s good or as I originally intended.

I intended to ask 8 dollars for it. I can’t guarantee the game works 100% anymore, because it was made in a very old version of Godot, at a time when I was clearly far less organized and a worse programmer. It’s certainly not worth it to completely redo the project or check and rewrite large chunks of it.

Instead, I’ll finish whatever was on the to-do list for it, then release for 5 dollars on Itch.io.

Why at this time? Because the theme of the game is closely linked to summer and holiday/vacation.

Summer/Fall 2025

I will finish that second game that was 95% done. It’s made in the latest version of Godot with better structure, but still … not great. In fact, looking back at the project, I’d call it 70% done. Which is why I do this one after the other project, because it will certainly be more work.

It’s a game idea focused around different “arenas”. (Same core gameplay; different level elements and fun tweaks per arena.) Obviously, I’d planned way too many arenas and features and whatnot.

I’ll scope down the game to just 10 arenas. Cut out any features that stopped working or were flunky to begin with. Release for 5 dollars on Itch.io

Winter 2025

Hopefully, I’ll have found some time here and there to slowly move along a bigger project, to be released at this point. On Steam. An actual commercial release. At least 10 dollars.

We’ll see how big it gets. We’ll see if we get there. But that’s the plan. This is my one “big idea” that I always thought would be amazing fun and would actually be worth making into something bigger. (Though, chunked into minigames and kept minimalis, of course.)

Somewhere 2026

My second “big idea”. (Yes, I only have two. I have more than 100 board game ideas and novel ideas, most of which feel really promising and ambitious. But when it comes to video games, I really only have a handful of ideas that make me go “yes, I should make that, and it should be proper paid release on Steam”. Shows my priorities, I guess.)

I started this one years ago and it was a huge success. Fun from the start, bouts of laughter, easy to pick up, people stopped to watch as they walked by.

So why on earth didn’t I continue? Well, those events I mentioned at the start of the article. This was the big victim of those events, this idea was the one I pursued at the time. This idea is the one that made me consider returning to game dev at all, instead of just leaving it be forever.

So, I guess, at the time there was also this thought of “this idea is too promising to waste, let’s pick it back up when I actually have the right headspace for it”. Somewhere in 2026, I should have finished it enough to release it.

Afterwards? We’ll see. Maybe I’ll stop making video games forever. Maybe the games do very well and actually become a source of income. I can’t predict the future and I think it’s foolish in general to try and look too far ahead.

But if I do this, I’ll have closed that previous chapter, finishing all the old games and archiving whatever projects that are left open. And I’ll have made the few games that I actually think would bring a lot of people (local multiplayer) joy. And if all of that hasn’t given me any income (and just more … silence), then I guess it’s also a clear sign.

Conclusion

I mostly wrote this article to explain my absence from the game dev scene for many years, and to write down a solid plan for myself. With my mind going a million places, every second, I really need to write stuff down and go through an entire thought process. Otherwise it’s just a mess, I can’t decide, and nothing ever happens. I’ve subtly moved the goalposts for these game projects at least ten times before, writing them down in some free spot in my agenda, then crossing them out again and moving them around.

By actually having a more concrete plan, and telling the world about it, it hopefully becomes more set in stone.

I think this plan is reasonable. More than enough time to reach the milestones. A more healthy approach to game dev that leaves enough gaps to keep up my health, to vary the workload, to mostly focus on my other projects. No more working on projects for too long, no more working on projects that I don’t actually want to make but would be more “sellable” or have a “larger audience”. At the same time, actually ask money for all the hard work, actually get games on Steam, actually decisively return to video game development.

We’ll see how it turns out in practice. Most likely, deadlines and goals will shift a lot, but stay true to the general idea of the planning.