I’ve wanted to make games for as long as I can remember. Over the years, that goal has evolved, but it’s always been there. I love the process: turning ideas into something real, figuring out what makes a game fun, and creating experiences that resonate with people.

But I’ve never thought of myself as a game developer. I don’t do it full-time. I don’t release games regularly. And yet, almost by accident, I ended up making a game that got released, played, and recognized in a way nothing else I’ve built has.

childhood

When I was a kid, video games were seen as a sugary, addictive hobby and was discouraged by my family. I got my own system to play games pretty young (cobalt blue GBA SP), around 8 or 10, but it felt like I was way behind the curve - many of my friends had already been playing for a couple of years at that point.

I don’t know if at the time, I really thought I could be a game developer. But I spent tons of time doing the only thing that I knew how to do: drawing and writing game designs.

I vividly remember reading a particular issue of Nintendo Power magazine (Dec 2005) over and over with an in-depth write up on Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I never had played a Fire Emblem game before but I fell in love with the promotion mechanics, the RPG stat blocks, and the character designs. I would draft up my own stat blocks, class trees, and draw my own characters with imagined names and backstories.

Eventually, as time passed, I didn’t do this as much anymore, and largely my dreams of being a game developer faded into the background while other new dreams started to bloom.

school

In middle school, Facebook got big, and I found myself in a similar position: not building anything, but instead drawing detailed product UI designs and writing up press releases for apps I could (or “would”) develop. I wanted to create beautiful, novel apps and video games but I was spending my time in the ideation phase, and didn’t have the tools or the knowhow to step into building and tinkering.

My obsession with huge tech companies and web apps drew me to computer science when I started college and it was a perfect fit. I have had moments since graduating where I wish I pursued a music major, or even a physics major, but I think if I had done that, I would have found that computer science was always another love for me.

I dabbled in video game development throughout college using a couple of different technologies. I built a choose-your-own-adventure game with a friend for a final project for one of our classes. I prototyped a game like Life Simulator using what skills I had in Android development, but that effort petered out without a lot of competence in that area. I watched a ton of Unity tutorials but I couldn’t quite crack it.

I finally could start to get my ideas on paper into working prototypes with my newfound computer science skills, but I struggled to complete these projects. There were always gaps in my abilities that would place (seemingly) insurmountable hurdles in my path. Instead of wrapped up, they were often abandoned once I got stuck on something.

I could have made more games like my choose-your-own-adventure game, but… didn’t. It didn’t feel like something I could be proud of, but something I just threw together for school. I needed to push myself in order to make something better and better. If I retread the same ground, I wouldn’t be growing and improving.

post-grad

I moved to Berlin and found myself with a lot more time for game development (no friends), but still struggling to make progress toward my goals while learning on my own.

To solve both problems, I joined my first game jam, and that catapulted me up the steep learning curve of making games in Unity for the first time. I got a huge running start in just several hours with somebody who already knew what they were doing.

Since then, I’ve participated in a handful of game jams, built some games with friends, and worked on a couple of solo projects here and there. All of these projects dissipated almost as fast as they started; once they were built they faded into the background.

I had hoped that by this point, I would have created something with a little more longevity. But it felt like I couldn’t ever make anything great unless I was completely devoting my time to it. And I just couldn’t do that while working 40 hours a week at my day job.

I’ve felt tension for since graduating college about being a software engineer, but not being a game dev. Why not make the jump? I think I’d be happier, and prouder, to work on video games full time. But I’d almost certainly get paid less and work much harder and longer. Would I be more frustrated being so close to making games but not being able to make all creative decisions?

this time around

This odd opportunity came out of nowhere:

  1. Our quarterly “hack week” at work, where engineers are given a week to rapidly prototype and experiment on anything they want.
  2. I was in the middle of buying a house and moving, and my manager gave me a free pass to truly do whatever I want - even take it easy and not pressure myself to fully complete something during hack week. If I had nothing to show for at the end of those 5 days, it was no sweat.
  3. I just finished reading The Artist’s Way with a collective of other artists. My mind was in a plastic state and I wanted to try to practice some of the things I learned in the book.

That week felt like a tailwind. Many of the hurdles that prevented, or otherwise demotivated, me from making a game were gone. I knew that I needed to take ahold of this opportunity and make the most of it. So instead of resting and taking it easy (even with my manager’s encouragement to do so), I sprung into action and made something, that by many objective standards, has been my most successful game to date.

the game

The game I made that week is nothing like I would have expected when I set out to make games several years ago. In my narrow-minded, snap perspective of what a video game is, I imagine they require art, music, physics, a game engine, logic, challenges, and virtual space.

Instead, my most successful game is a Slackbot. It’s text-based. There are no graphics except for emojis. There are no physics or art assets or challenges. I didn’t use a game engine - I created a web service.

The game is a collaborative idle game. It advances at a glacial pace and is played out over weeks and months. Users in our company Slack workspace play the game by giving each other veggie emojis (e.g. 🥕, 🥒, 🥬) as kudos in messages or reactions. Whenever a user gives another user an emoji for good work, that veggie or fruit “feeds” an animal at a virtual animal sanctuary. The animals grow healthier and stronger, and are eventually released back out into the wild, allowing new animals to come to the sanctuary and repeat the process.

success

Why do I consider this my most successful game?

It’s “complete”: it has a beginning, middle, and end. There’s special cases for the start of the game, and there is progression that people are actively contributing to. The end hasn’t been coded in yet technically… but I’ll add it eventually.

It was released. Some of my game jam games have been released on itch.io, but this game was launched. I put some skin in the game when releasing it to my company. I was at risk of losing face if I had programmed something wrong or didn’t expect certain behaviors.

People play it. And not just friends that I asked to play it for testing purposes. There are players who I’ve never spoken to personally.

I got an award for it. My company voted my project as “People’s Choice” against all other projects from the hack week.

I tapped into personal experiences. Animals at the sanctuary are based off of individual animals I know and love, or species that I adore and admire.

I got paid for it! Honestly, one of the most important criteria of being a “professional”.

These facts exist in a mental purgatory for me. It’s hard to accept that this random project met a lot of “concrete” criteria for being a success. It feels like something that I cobbled together without a ton of intent or deep passion. It just sounded fun to do.

The thing that boggles my mind the most is that this was enabled by my full-time day job. I was so convinced that my day job prevents me from creating games, and here it was providing me a safe place. And I was able to reach a real peak in my creative journey from this project.

how did this happen?

When I make art, there’s a voice in my head that demands involvement in every creative decision. This voice tells me that I’m not pushing myself hard enough.

If something is easy for me, I can’t be proud of it.

If I want to make something good, I have to suffer for it.

This voice makes itself a cornerstone to every project I work on. It must be involved otherwise the thing that I make will be shit. It stops me in my tracks and prevents me from making any progress.

From nine to five, that voice is largely silent. It has nothing to say because I don’t care too much about what goes on in between those hours. I want my work to be high quality, yes, but I don’t identify with it. As soon as I start to identify with something, this voice starts to pipe up.

Somehow, this game snuck past this voice, and the voice only noticed at the end of the week. I realized what I had done - what I was capable of - and I dispelled a powerful myth without even meaning to.

I made something great, and it wasn’t even really that hard for me.

I am the proudest of a project that played to my strengths, rather than only feeling proud of overcoming some great obstacle, or fighting to make games with skills that are unrefined and untrained. I used the skills that I spend every day honing that may not be explicitly “game dev skills”. I found a bubble inside of those where I can be creative and make art.

Instead of adhering to my definition of a “video game”, I broke the mold and made something more unique and true to me.