During covid I was, as many others, forced to work from home. At the time I worked as a consultant in the mobile app industry, so working from home was pretty easy to adapt to. It also came with some more free time since I didn’t spend time commuting daily.

I decided some time during 2020 that I wanted to make a mobile game with a small enough scope that I would actually be able to launch it. I really enjoy developing games in my spare time, but as many of you game devs can probably testify to, our spare time game projects too often become behemoths we eventually abandon somewhere on an old dusty harddrive or deep within a forgotten repository. This time should be different! I wanted to prove to myself that I could actually make a game that somebody other than my close family and friends could actually get to enjoy.

I am a programmer and not an artist by profession, but I have always loathed using mash-ups of different art asset packs for my game projects, and I’ve never had the courage to shell out the money to actually pay for some custom made assets. So the solution has always seemed to be to make my own assets. Growing up in the late 90’s and 00’s, I was very fascinated by 3D games and movies. I picked up Blender as a teenager and spent a lot of my free time modeling. That’s why 3D has been my go-to ever since I started making games. The problem is, creating 3D assets is very time consuming! That’s why I picked up Aseprite and pixel art. As I said, I am no artist, but I realized that by going to a smaller scale (16×16 or 32×32 px) it did not take too long to make assets I felt had the fidelity I was looking for.

Making a mobile game I had a lot of focus on keeping the interactions simple. When I play mobile games I really enjoy being able to just use one hand. It should have a low barrier of entry. On the other hand I have always been a huge fan of the RPG fantasy genre, so I knew that I wanted to involve some of these elements, but without bloating my scope. How do you combine casual interaction with epic world building?

The answer for me was to make a dungeon crawler puzzle game. I fleshed out a simple prototype where you could move a character on tile squares by swiping. The objective of each map was simple: Get the key to unlock the door and then get to the door! I implemented a single obstacle mechanic by making some tiles disappear periodically. It was incredibly simple, but with endless possibilities for different level creations. The people I showed this demo thought so too, so I decided I wanted to expand on the idea.

 I got very hooked on doing pixel art, and suddenly a game started to take form in my doodling. I drew different tile sets with different biomes, and enemies like zombies and skeletons. The character Moldy was actually the first thing I drew, at the time I just called him dwarf. I had this idea of a dwarf going underground discovering wondrous dungeons. The first animation I did was head bobbing, and together with my brother we quickly came up with a soundtrack for the game and decided that ALL animations needed to move to the beat of the soundtrack. I really like that soundtrack, it gives a sense of urgency and progression, and really helps the game move forward.

As the project started taking shape I realized I needed to organize my thoughts, and I started putting all the feature requests I came up with into a Kanban board. It was a bit of a drag at the start, but it really helped me stay motivated, and it made it much easier to jump into the project after a break because I had some clear short term goals to work towards. It really helped me feel that the project was progressing.

When I got close to the 1 year mark of spare time development, I started putting “1.0” tags on the remaining feature tasks. I realized that I wanted to wrap up and get the game out soon! It was a hard but very healthy exercise. It was very satisfying to complete the last “1.0” feature. Knowing that I had reached my goal was really fulfilling and liberating.

Now I am in the middle of beta testing, and getting through the inner workings of App Store and Play Store. I’m riding on the high after finishing development, and I’m excitedly anticipating launching the game. It’s the best feeling to set out and complete a long term goal like this, and I think I will adapt this practice, not only to my game development projects, but any long term endeavors I might set out to do.

/Sam