My son Luke has started adding art to our top-down bullet hell experiment, and getting feedback has turned out to be harder than I expected.

If anyone’s interested in checking it out and giving it a proper shredding, you can find it here. Any feedback is hugely appreciated.

https://davidbyrne.itch.io/spellcasting-01

The game now just needs more balancing and design. Again and again, game design is our limiting factor now. That boss is boring, this level is too samey, this attack is too strong. It’s a nice place to be, and every time we tweak a number or add a phase or attack to a boss, the game gets one step closer to being good.

Funnily enough, because of the balance board I created for this game, which exposes all tweakable values and even lets non-coders create enemies and bosses, our good friend Claude has been relegated to small fixes and grunt work.

But a new addiction is starting to surface in the online spaces I frequent

It would still be a step up from doomscrolling or burning hours on Netflix, but I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on.

It’s not an addiction to Claude Code.

It’s an addiction to making things.

For the first time, the gap between “I have an idea” and “this exists” has basically collapsed. If you can think it, you can rough it out in minutes. Not months. Not “I should learn to code someday.” Minutes.

That’s new.

And it’s not just experienced devs shipping faster. It’s people who have never built anything before suddenly building things. Real things. Useful things. Weird things. Funny things.

Of course, people are hooked.

That feeling of turning nothing into something is incredibly hard to walk away from.

And yes, there are practical limits. You hit usage caps. You get rate-limited. You have to wait for the timer to reset. You get kicked out right when you are in flow.

Which, honestly, is probably the only thing stopping some of us from disappearing into it entirely.

But that friction also proves the point. People are not compulsively using a tool for its own sake. They are trying to keep creating.

There are plenty of addictions worth worrying about.

This one does not feel like it belongs on the list.

And so, even though we have one game built out using Claude, of course, now I have usage for more.

We have our 2D game clipping along.

But 3D. I have been messing with some different ideas in this space. A Zelda-like game where I pushed my abilities to create environments. A brief sojourn into an emergent puzzler. But nothing felt like “the” idea.

So with Luke now working on the 2D game, I asked him if there were no constraints, what would you like to make?

And so with some discussion, we have built a design doc for our next set of Claude-built systems, and I have been noodling on it for a day or two now. Nothing to show yet, but the next article will examine that process.

Subscribe now

This week, I had an odd shift in my usual workflow.

Normally, a coding session is a bit of a ritual. Coffee. Hide from the smaller kids. Loud EDM. Head down. Lock in. It is focused, deliberate, and very physical in a strange way. I am at the keyboard, pushing things forward line by line.

But this week was different.

I had a well-defined game design document. Clear constraints. Real structure. So instead of sitting down to grind through it, I set up Claude remote on my phone, pointed it at my laptop, and went hiking.

Which felt wrong immediately.

I was halfway up a hill, pulling my phone out of my pocket, watching my project evolve without me touching it. Files changing. Systems are getting built. Progress happening.

I was not doing the work.

But the work was still getting done.

And that is a strange feeling.

There is a kind of guilt to it. Like I am cheating somehow or skipping a step I am supposed to enjoy. Because usually the satisfaction comes from the struggle. The tiny decisions, the debugging, the why is this not working moments.

This removed all of that.

But it replaced it with something else.

A different kind of loop.

Instead of:

write code → test → fix → repeat

It became:

define clearly → observe → course correct

Less like playing an instrument.

More like conducting.

And the quality of the output seems to depend almost entirely on the quality of the plan.

When the plan is vague, things drift.

When the plan is tight, things move.

The bottleneck is not typing speed anymore. It is thinking clearly enough upfront.

There is also something slightly unsettling about making progress while being absent.

I was out walking, properly present with the world, and at the same time, my project was moving forward in the background. It breaks the old tradeoff.

You used to have to choose.

Be present with your life

Or make progress on your work

Now you can blur the two.

I am not sure yet if that is healthy.

But I do know this.

If this keeps working, then the skill that matters most is not going to be coding.

It is going to be:

defining systems clearly
setting constraints properly
and trusting the process enough to step away

Which is a very different kind of craft.

That is all for this week. More AI musings, I know. In the next article, I will try to move away from this trend.

Subscribe now

And again, if anyone wants to check out the game and tear it apart, it is here:

https://davidbyrne.itch.io/spellcasting-01

Hi, I’m David, and this is my space to discuss what I love most: creating video games with my 14-year-old son, Luke. Last year, we released a roguelike called Brawlberry. This year, we released our demo for our Irish-themed couch-coop 3D platformer called Druid’s Crown. This is where I share my progress and nerd out about all things games and game development.

Somewhere along the way, we decided every hobby needs to become a side hustle.

If you run, start a YouTube channel.
If you cook, start a TikTok.
If you make games, market them.

I started this Substack thinking I might do exactly that.

Now I am not so sure.

I started my Substack as a way to build a community for my game dev escapades and to share what is one of my greatest joys: working alongside my son making games. Initially, I released an article every Sunday like clockwork. I had a backlog of articles ready to go when I started in an attempt to stay ahead of my busy life.

Subscribe now

In my head, I had visions of hordes of gamer dads flocking to my articles. Of course, that is not the reality of the creative process. In reality, it is a long, slow slog, sometimes punctuated by a viral boost that levels up your exposure.

As the honeymoon period faded, my relationship with this Substack changed as well. I want to write about the work Luke and I do, and the nerdy thoughts that I have. Not for any particular reason, but because I enjoy it. It has shifted to being more of a journal entry than an attempt to garner attention for our games.

Naturally, the articles slowed down, and now I can write when the feeling takes me instead of trying to hit that Sunday deadline. It seems like a healthier approach anyway.

I trail run and hike quite often, and I like to record snippets from those adventures, making small home videos that my family and I often look back on and laugh about. Why is my instinct to create a YouTube channel that earns me millions from what are, at best, bad home videos? They already are what they are meant to be.

With that in mind, I would like to shift another part of my creative process here. Right now, the games we develop are developed to sell. With that comes some level of secrecy and constraint. Sure, we want to show the cool bits to garner interest, but we also do not want to give too much away and lose the perceived value of our games.

With Luke’s games, if he wants to do that, that is fine. We still have Steam pages and aspirations for our games. But what I would really love is more feedback on our games earlier.

Development is a long slog, and we are learning all the time. I want to show the process as we go. I want to be told it is crap because of reason X or Y, so I can fix it now rather than months into development. Maybe someday we will make something worthy of secrecy and constraint, but I am not convinced we are there yet.

Taking the position of constant learning and improving, that growth mindset is important to me not only for my own development but also to model it for my son.

Subscribe now

So from now on, each article will come with an itch.io link to whatever it is I am working on that week. It will be a current build with nothing held back. No polish, no marketing veneer, just the game as it exists right now.

If you decide to give it a go, I would genuinely love to hear what you think. If something feels fun, tell me. If something feels terrible, tell me that too. That kind of feedback months earlier in development is far more valuable than polite silence when the game is finished.

The goal here is simple: build in the open, keep learning, and hopefully make something better each week.

So here it is. The current build of Spell Casting. It’s the game I talked about in my previous article. It works with keyboard and mouse for one player, but plug in a few controllers, and you can try it with two to four players. There is progression, unlocks, bosses, and loads of enemy and spell types. There is also absolutely no art, sounds or effects.

There are probably bugs.

But hopefully, there is also a spark of fun.

AI is impossible to ignore right now. Between the proselytising and the doomsaying, every developer seems to have an opinion.

As a professional developer, I have to grapple with AI as a real tool in modern software development. But as a hobbyist game developer, I can ignore most of that noise and simply experiment.

I can push the tools and see what they can actually do.

For years, I have used ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot inside my IDE mostly as a very fast search tool, eliminating visits to Stack Overflow in record time. Agentic programming, sometimes called vibe coding, was something I deliberately avoided. I like to maintain full control over what I am building, both at work and at home.

Subscribe now

But as often happens, things moved quickly.

After watching The Living Philosophy’s experiments with vibe coding as a non-programmer, curiosity got the better of me. I decided to try Claude Code’s newest models.

So I bought a subscription and started noodling with game development and my new collaborator, Claude.

But where to start?

Experiment One: Luke’s Arena Fighter

I had been experimenting with 3D environments for a Zelda-like project, but I did not want to risk that yet. I did not quite trust the tool enough to unleash it on my current baby.

Then I glanced over at my son Luke’s desk.

He had been building a party arena fighter with his little brother, something similar to Stick Fight, the chaotic multiplayer game where players bounce around tiny arenas blasting each other with ridiculous weapons.

They were having great fun creating one-shot weapons and attempting dramatic parries.

A game like this thrives on content. The more guns, the better.

So I asked to see his code.

Luckily, Luke had structured it well. All weapons extended from a base Gun class, with only one method (a piece of code) changing between weapons, the firing behaviour.

Variation was the goal.

So I set Claude to work.

I asked it to study the architecture and generate five new guns. After a few minutes, it asked if I wanted to auto-accept the changes. Instead, I reviewed the code, checked it was not touching anything it should not, accepted the changes, and pressed play.

Boom.

Five new weapons.

One weapon fired a spread of bullets that bounced around the arena like angry pinballs. Another launched a slow-moving orb that exploded into fragments on impact. One simply fired backwards, which was not very useful but did make Luke laugh.

A couple immediately hit my own character, which meant they did nothing. A quick prompt fixed that. Two were too similar to existing weapons, so they were deleted.

Subscribe now

Still, after about an hour, three new guns were ready. I sent them to Luke for approval and art.

Encouraged, I tried again the next night.

Another five guns appeared. There were small fixes and some balancing required, but overall, not too bad.

Luke joked that I could have coded them myself. He was probably right.

But he did not object to the new weapons appearing in his game.

AI was winning.

So the next day, I escalated.

Fifty weapons, please, Mr Claude.

It happily generated fifty.

I placed them in a separate folder and tested them one by one. Many were duplicates or too similar to existing ideas, so they were deleted. A few were buggy, but a couple of prompts fixed them.

Out of fifty, we kept perhaps fifteen or twenty.

Those went straight into the game.

The real bottleneck quickly became the art pipeline.

Luke now had forty weapons to draw.

Encouraged by that success, I tried the same approach with environmental objects such as barrels, lasers, traps and other hazards.

This time, I used Claude’s planning mode so it could ask questions before writing code. That worked much better. Instead of filtering everything afterwards, I could guide the design ahead of time.

We ended up keeping about thirty objects.

After another intense art session from Luke, we tested them all. Most worked straight away with only minor tweaks.

Then I tried level generation.

That was the first real failure.

I asked Claude to generate fifty levels using the objects we had created.

It happily produced them.

They were terrible.

Objects were scaled strangely, arranged awkwardly, and rarely produced interesting gameplay. Out of fifty levels, I salvaged perhaps three or four.

It was the first hint that generating content was easy. Designing a game was something else entirely.

At that point, it became obvious that level design would have to be done by hand.

Which turned out to be a great learning moment.

I cannot easily describe what makes a good level, and clearly, the AI does not understand that concept either.

AI is not a silver bullet for every game development problem.

Subscribe now

Still, as a production tool, it was incredibly useful. Given a clear structure and a simple task, it performed extremely well when generating variations.

And some of the weapons it generated were ideas I would never have considered.

Experiment Two: Letting AI Build the Systems

The gun experiment showed me something interesting. AI was extremely good at generating variations of existing ideas.

But I wondered if it could do something more ambitious.

Working with ChatGPT to refine some ideas, I landed on a concept for a top-down cooperative bullet-hell game in which the player’s weapon is a modular wand.

The system worked like this.

Core
Determines how the spell fires.

Behaviour
Controls how the projectile moves.

Trigger
Determines what happens when enemies are hit or killed.

Element
Defines damage types such as fire, poison, or lightning.

Once that structure was defined, I asked Claude to build the architecture and generate the components that plugged into it.

New cores. New behaviours. New triggers. New elements.

Off it went.

Since this was my own project, I was far more relaxed about reviewing the code. I auto-accepted most changes and only checked things occasionally. When something broke, I pasted the error back into the agent and asked it to fix it.

Surprisingly, it worked very well.

Before long, I had a wand system capable of producing roughly sixty-one thousand possible combinations.

Of course, this is similar to how Borderlands claims thousands of weapons. Many are variations rather than unique designs.

But it was still impressive to build that system so quickly.

There was just one problem.

There was still no game.

The Real Bottleneck

I built more systems.

Environmental objects. A wave system. Even enemies that reused the wand system for their own attacks.

And then the real problem appeared.

I had systems, not a game.

AI had accelerated development enormously. Without the burden of writing every system by hand, the real bottleneck became game design itself.

In other words, AI had removed the programming bottleneck and exposed the design bottleneck.

What does a run of the game look like?

How do things unlock?

How are wands built and used?

Those decisions had to come from me.

I did not want Claude’s game.

I wanted my game.

The wand system went through several iterations.

At first, players could press a button to generate a random wand. This was great for testing, but not very fun. Once you have found a strong combination, you simply stick with it.

Next, I allowed players to swap components from enemy drops.

The same problem appeared.

Eventually, players converged on a single optimal build. The difficulty curve is even inverted, with early levels harder than later ones.

Boss unlocked components helped a little, but still did not encourage enough experimentation.

Finally, I landed on a system where enemies drop randomly generated wands with limited ammunition. Players are forced to cycle through weapons during a run, while boss progression upgrades the default attack.

That turned out to be far more fun.

And the interesting thing is that I had no idea this would be the right system when I started.

Being able to prototype quickly with AI made exploring these ideas much easier.

Subscribe now

What AI Could and Could Not Do

The strange thing about working with AI like this is that it did not remove the work.

It simply moved the work somewhere else.

I was no longer spending nights writing weapon classes or wiring systems together. Instead, I was figuring out what kind of game I actually wanted to make.

Claude could generate fifty weapons in minutes.

It could build systems producing sixty-one thousand possible wands.

But it could not tell me what was fun.

That part still belongs to us.

And honestly, that might be the best outcome.

AI can help us build faster and explore ideas we might never attempt otherwise. But the heart of the game, the moment when Luke and his brother burst out laughing because some ridiculous weapon just knocked them across the map, still comes from people sitting in a room playing something we made together.

Play the game here ( Feedback welcome )

The idea of places, not spaces, is something I heard recently from pixel artist and YouTuber Adam C. Younis. He is currently working on his game Insignia, and in a recent video, he mentioned that he was going through his entire game and turning all the spaces in his world into places.

It is a simple concept, but one I find myself returning to again and again.

When building larger games, I have often heard developers talk about having game design pillars, core ideas they can always reference to remind themselves what the game is really about. If you are doing something that does not bring you closer to those overarching pillars, you are probably going off track.

Subscribe now

I have always liked this idea and have tried to come up with pillars for my own games. For Druids Crown, it was Coop, Platforming, and Nature. For Brawlberry, it was Boss Rush, Multiplayer, and Hades.

More recently, though, I have started thinking about pillars in a broader sense, not as something defined per game, but as pillars for game creation itself. Pillars that reinforce the lessons we have learned from each project, and that gently push us toward the kinds of games we actually want to see made.

“Places not spaces” is the first of these that I want to set firmly into the foundations of our work.

This idea actually started forming during the making of Druid’s Crown, our coop 3D platformer. After playing Split Fiction, It Takes Two, and Astro Bot, I became enamoured with the density of content they offer. In Astro Bot, everything does something; everything you hit has some smart or fun animation tied to it. In Split Fiction, mechanics are introduced and discarded with abandon. Nothing overstays its welcome. At first, I described this pillar simply as density.

Subscribe now

But as we built Druid’s Crown, the growing size of our platforming tree made something else clear. Scale and emptiness have just as much of a place in our games as density does. That is when “Places not spaces” finally snapped into focus.

When navigating a space in a game, you are usually just going from A to B. The space itself is an annoyance, an obstacle between you and a place of interest. A duplicated corridor in an FPS is a perfect example. We do not care about it. We do not know who uses it, why it exists, or what it is for. There is no story attached to it. We just kill the enemies in it and pass through to the next challenge.

A place, on the other hand, has character. It has a story. It has a vibe.

Hobbiton is a place. We all know it. We can feel it. Every time I watch The Lord of the Rings, I never want to leave Hobbiton. That is the kind of experience I want to create. I want to make games where the story is not just told, it is felt.

This is harder than it sounds. Level creation is full of conflicting requirements. Do you need space to introduce new enemies? New mechanics? New skills to test? Greyboxing ( Early stage level creation ), by its very nature, leans toward creating spaces because of its low fidelity. Can a place even exist without the set dressing that creates ambience?

Subscribe now

For me, it now comes down to initial intention.

While greyboxing a level for Flowstrike, our VR trick sword game, I had the pleasure of blocking out an indoor environment. Keeping places, not spaces, in mind, I started asking different questions. What does the front of this building look like? Where do you go next? How does this connect to offices and the canteen? Where are the toilets?

Suddenly, the greybox had a different meaning. I was not just laying out geometry. I was creating a lived-in environment. And even though, for now, it quite literally is just space, I have left room for it to become a place.

In a small prototype Zelda-like game I’m making, I've limited myself to 4 scenes, where I am trying to pack as much as I can into those 4 spaces, and the results have been great so far! In fact, Ocarina of Time is a great example of “Places not spaces”. While researching the game, I was watching one of those YouTube retrospective video essays when they noted, “Ocarina was a game you had nostalgia for while playing for the first time”.

I believe this new pillar has already led to better results in our games, and I am excited to keep pushing this philosophy forward. As for what other pillars we will end up adopting, we will have to see.

Subscribe now

My eldest son, Luke and I have spent years building a hobby of making games together. Even though I have plenty of thoughts about why it worked, the actual process of getting him up to speed on programming and game development feels like a mystery to me. It happened in fits and bursts, slowly, over a long period of time.

(See our current project, Flowstrike).

Now I find myself in that position again. Harry, my middle child, is six years old and starting to show an interest and, more importantly, the ability to participate in our family tradition.

I want to make one thing very clear: this path is not for everyone. I taught students for six years at the college level, and by the second year, it became obvious who would do well, who would be great, and who didn’t have it.

And that’s fine. Not everyone should be a programmer. Not everyone is a game developer. But you won’t know until you try.

Subscribe now

Having a child try a bunch of different things is, to me, a parent’s duty. We don’t know who a child is; they tell us.

So, in a vain attempt to influence another child in a nerdy direction, I’m beginning this journey with Harry just as I did with Luke. This time, though, I’ll try recording it better. There’s one more child to go, a daughter this time, and I’ll be prepared.

Maybe Harry will have the same affinity as Luke. Maybe he’ll naturally gravitate toward other things, music, art, something else entirely. Maybe I’ll fall flat on my face, and he’ll lead me down a completely different path.

I’m excited to see.

Where It Began

This Christmas, we began our journey.

Harry already plays games on the PlayStation and has a huge passion for Astro Bot. Minecraft, Goat Simulator 3, Vampire Survivors, and Wobbly Life are all stand‑out favourites.

We also just happened to have a spare PC lying around the house, so it was time to convert him from PlayStation to desktop.

After some faff resetting the PC, I was faced with a blank desktop and a decision to make:

Where do you start?

What follows is my current list of go‑to software for prospective techy kids. I’ll include a brief explanation and my reasoning behind each one.

Subscribe now

Pivot Stick Figure Animator

A classic for anyone raised in my era of the internet. Newgrounds flash stick‑figure fights probably shaped a worrying amount of my personality. Pivot was one of my first entries into PC animation, and honestly, it still holds up.

It teaches the basics of animation: frames, timelines, and onion skinning. It’s a simple, easy, and fun way to dip your toes into animation, with very little supervision required.

For parents without animation experience who want to expose their kids to the medium, I recommend two resources:

• Alan Becker’s 12 Principles of Animation – Try applying even one principle per session, and you’ll be animating up a storm in no time.

• Watch great animation – But actively talk about why it’s great. What makes it feel good? What makes it interesting?

Some of our regular viewing:

• Spider‑Verse movies

• One Piece (some swearing and blood use your judgement)

• Avatar: The Last Airbender and Korra

• Song of the Sea

• Anything Studio Ghibli

• The Dragon Prince

Scratch

The main prerequisite here is the ability to read, but they don’t need to be fluent. Kids quickly learn the predefined blocks as visual shapes.

Scratch is a fantastic entry point to coding, especially if you use making games as the carrot on the stick. There are loads of tutorials you can follow together, even if you’re not a coder yourself.

That said, I’d strongly recommend doing the tutorial yourself first. Any slowdown while you’re figuring things out can be a real interest‑killer.

Scratch introduces core coding concepts using Lego‑like blocks that snap together into working systems. It’s also a great opportunity to introduce following instructions and tutorials, getting kids self‑reliant is the real goal here. You won’t always have the time to sit beside them.

I would move to Godot as soon as it’s reasonable. Scratch is a conceptual stepping stone, not the destination.

GIMP / Krita / Aseprite

I try to keep software free where possible. GIMP and Krita are excellent free tools for 2D art and are well worth installing as creative outlets.

In our house, we use a lot of pixel art, so Aseprite is our go‑to. It’s paid, but it’s a small one‑time cost for something we use almost every day. It also has great built‑in support for pixel animation.

It’s essentially industry‑standard for pixel art, and the reduced toolset compared to something like Photoshop actually makes it easier to learn. Set a canvas size, fill it with pixels, and off you go.

Paper is also a perfectly valid alternative. Draw worlds and ideas together, then try recreating them digitally in Scratch.

Blender

There’s no getting around it. Blender is complicated. It’s a professional‑grade 3D modelling tool, and it’s easy to scare off even adults.

That said, with care, I think you can start here.

Start extremely small: basic shapes, basic tools, basic ideas. Actively restrict what they’re allowed to touch and encourage them to ignore everything else. Early sessions should be short and light; you’re just trying to build comfort, not mastery.

This is where I started with Harry.

Our first session involved adding an object, moving it around, and doing some very simple cuts and extrusions. The next day, we repeated that and added moving individual points. After three to five sessions, we made a “tree”, basically a cube with a pyramid on top.

One great activity (with some setup from the parent) is using the Ucupaint add‑on, which allows kids to paint directly onto the modelsimilar to colouring in. It naturally encourages rotating and inspecting the object, which is a vital 3D skill.

Subscribe now

Games (Yes, Really)

Let them play games on the PC.

Most kids just need time to get comfortable with the mouse and keyboard. It’s completely fine to have games that are PC‑only. You’re secretly training typing, mousing, and general computer confidence.

Harry joins our Discord calls with my family, and hearing him screaming down the mic at my dad and brother while playing is absolutely hilarious. Our most recent foray into online gaming with him was Enshrouded, and we all greatly enjoyed his sound effects as he waded through enemies alongside us.

Patience

This is the most important part.

You’re operating from a vastly higher level of ability as an adult. It’s hard to remember what it’s like not to know anything yet. There have been plenty of times I’ve realised I didn’t have the patience that day and aborted a session entirely because pushing would do more harm than good.

Keep it fun. If it’s not fun, change tack.

Harry and I have been brainstorming a game idea together. We’ve had a blast using a whiteboard, and he comes up with new ideas daily. We’ve started making models, and I spend my time building systems so he can drag his creations into the game and see them do the things he imagined.

We’ll progress bit by bit as his abilities grow. I’ll keep myself interested by learning alongside him. Who knows, maybe this little thing we’re making will be the game that earns us all the money.

Below are some clips of our progress so far.

And one extra‑special clip from today, where he proudly added more items to the scene to, as he put it: “Blow up more flowers.”

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe now

I constantly struggle with discipline when it comes to the things that matter the least in my everyday life. Work and bills? The non-negotiables of life are easy for me to hit because the extrinsic motivation to complete them is so strong. They just happen.

But working on games in my spare time? Working out? Playing music? These are not essential parts of my life in the same way, and yet, in another sense, they absolutely are. And that’s where the struggle begins.

Subscribe now

I enjoy a variety of things. There’s an endless list of things I want to try, things I want to improve at, and hitting all of them every day is a dream I fail at every day. So, with a month-long sprint ahead of me for Christmas, I wanted to make the most of those days. As I’ve done multiple times before, I set about trying to create habits that would let me hit each of these goals every day.

So, to start, I had to pick my daily tasks.

• Pills (simple to begin with, take morning supplements)

• Drink (start the day with a large water bottle)

• Jobs (apply for jobs)

• LeetCode (practice coding interviews for those jobs)

• Workout (run or gym, something every day)

• Spanish (Duolingo or reading)

• Music (guitar and singing)

• House (new house still needs a lot of work)

• Harry (the middle child has been left behind a bit with the chaos of a house move. It's time to focus on him, get his PC set up, and do some learning together)

• Project (game dev mostly with Luke, but other coding projects can sub in)

• Substack (write something every day)

• Stretch (I’m old and I work out a lot, gotta keep limber)

• Sleep (go to bed on time, you dope)

• No sweets (sweet tooth is my downfall and directly affects my running goals)

Once I settled on these goals, I wanted to be kind in this no-zero-day sprint. To take the pressure off, I went with a light-touch approach. The smallest iota of effort in any of these tasks counted as a goal completed. No minimums.

Subscribe now

Let my energy ebb and flow as it needs to. Some days I’d knock out 10km in the mountains, other days I’d run 3km out my front door and walk back. It didn’t matter; just keep at it.

I took this approach because there were so many things I wanted to do, but also because I’d failed before. I wanted to try something new. By keeping things fresh and building these habits slowly, I hoped momentum would eventually take over and help maintain them.

I created an Excel sheet and began on December 2nd.

A strong start. As with all new schedules, the beginning is the easiest. Sure, I didn’t go to bed on time, and I forgot I wasn’t eating sweets and ate a cake the moment my wife handed me one. Nonetheless, I was happy to get going. The light touch approach seemed to be working. The things I really didn’t want to do could be tiny efforts, and the things that were easy got a lot of attention.

Day two, still going strong. A bit worried that we had two days of sweets already under No Sweets, but still feeling positive.

A few days in now, and you can probably see where this is trending already. I started missing a few tasks, mainly due to life getting in the way. Nothing major, nothing missed out of laziness, just life being busy. Sleep and sweets were really becoming an issue, though.

Ouch. Looking back now, this could be seen as a real failure of the plan. But there’s an excuse. That big red hole of failure is life hitting fast and hard. Sickness rips through the family. Everyone’s sick, including me. Survival becomes the driving factor for a week or so. But I’m still tracking. I’m aware of my lack of goal hitting, and for once, it feels like an acceptable reason.

That one pillar of green is a flailing attempt to get back on track. Difficult after sickness knocked us all back, but a valiant attempt nonetheless. And then Christmas hit, and it was all over. I stopped tracking, and while I’m sure I hit some greens during that period, there’s no way to know now.

So here we are in the new year. Looking back on the tracking, I have some sympathy for my routine. It was unlucky, and probably unadvised, to try a sprint during such a busy season. But I learned some key things from the experience.

On the days I did well, I felt good. Accomplished. Things were moving. I definitely want that to become the norm, even if this attempt didn’t work.

Tracking in Excel was a mistake. Having to be on the computer to know what the next tasks were and to check them off was a barrier I didn’t need.

Subscribe now

Some things matter more than others. Sleep and sweets need real focus if I want to achieve my goals. They should take priority. Some tasks maybe don’t need tracking at all because they’re already easy to do.

Life happens. Staying consistent isn’t about having no zero days. It’s about always coming back to the routine.

So, with those points in mind, I’m back on schedule for the new year. I’ve switched to a new app, Streaks, on my phone, with my tasks set up. I’ve adjusted things slightly. And I’m going to keep going until I reach the point where the habits are ingrained.

(Update as of 09/01/2026: I’m 8 days into a streak on most goals!)

Wish me luck.

I know, I know. I should be taking this time over Christmas to fully focus on the VR sword game Luke and I are building and get a demo out as promised. But I found something awesome, and I had to sidetrack briefly to get it out of my system.

I was innocently scrolling through YouTube Shorts when I got struck by lightning.

A small frog in a cottage core scene, slowly going about his day.

I was completely captivated by this short. The artistry of the props and the frog, the animation, the overall vibe. All of it gave me a really warm feeling.

And then came an idea.

Subscribe now

Marketability is super important in indie game development. Getting someone to try your game in the first place is genuinely difficult. In the same way that a YouTube thumbnail and title sell a video, a game’s aesthetic and visuals act as its thumbnail and title. You can absolutely make a great game without these elements, but it is undeniably harder.

When I saw this frog, something lit up in my head. This specific aesthetic is a strong vibe, and I would love to make a game that lives in this space. I think it could do well, but only with the right game idea behind it.

So I shelved it, filed away in that mental drawer of ideas to be picked up someday.

But as the week went on, I kept coming back to the video. Again and again. I found myself obsessing over the animation more than anything else. At first, I assumed it was stop motion, a very time-consuming process, and I was baffled by how smooth it looked. Then, while lurking in the comments, someone mentioned the same thought and pointed out that it was puppetry.

Puppetry.

And just like that I was all in.

Subscribe now

Content creation is the slowest part of game development for us. Model creation and animation are a real bottleneck. How cool would it be to use puppetry to record animations in real life and then build a game around that?

Harold Halibut is a recent game that took a similar approach, scanning physical models and sets into a digital space. I am not sure I want to go that far, as it can feel like doing the same work twice, although the results are undeniably beautiful.

FMV games are another reference point. Sam Barlow’s games, such as Her Story, are a great example of how effective that format can be. What if I did something similar, but with puppets? I have never seen that before.

Marketability is about standing out and being different, but marketability alone is not enough. Making something purely because it is marketable lacks the soul and passion I want to express through games. It is that soul and passion that I love most about my favourite games. More than mechanics or visuals, it is the stories they tell that stay with me.

Subscribe now

So what story could I tell in this environment, and what kind of gameplay would support it?

There is one genre Luke has no interest in working on with me, and it happens to be an older, more niche genre that I deeply love. Point and click adventures were some of the first games I ever played, and I still keep a close eye on the genre today. I am an avid watcher of Day9’s Mostly Walking series.

Could I combine these things? Could I take this cosy aesthetic and weave a story through point-and-click style puzzles? I think I could. In fact, I know exactly how I would do it, and I have a very clear vision for what I want to make. Within a day, I had some basic point-and-click mechanics prototyped using placeholder AI-generated art.

James at The Living Philosophy has the cameras and the knowledge to help with the recording side of content creation.

I am confident I can make the sets. I spent a large portion of my childhood building and painting Warhammer models, so that part feels very familiar. The only missing piece was our protagonist.

Mr Frog.

Subscribe now

Weirdly, I can sew quite well. It is something I picked up from my mother when I was young, but knitting and crochet are not hobbies I have ever pursued. When I started searching for knitted frogs on Etsy, I discovered that Claire Garland has built an entire career around knitting small animals. The patterns are readily available. All I need to do is order them, get the wool and needles, and give it a go.

That is where I am now.

I will not be posting many updates on this until I have something tangible to show. I already have too many projects in motion, so this will happen quietly in the background, with me knitting away in spare moments.

But I am genuinely excited about this idea. I can see it working as a short episodic format, small vignette stories that let me practice and explore the kind of narrative I want to tell, in a way that feels unique and personal. If I can hit even one emotional beat in this first iteration, I will be delighted.

Subscribe now

So, the Druid’s Crown demo is now launched. It was a bit of a tumultuous ending, but we got it out the door in the end. One benefit of this being a hobby rather than a career is that when things do not go right, or when life priorities take over, we can take a step back and remember that this is not life or death. We can drop it for a while and come back when we are ready. That is exactly what we did.

Now we are back, and I am energised. Most people would think a job redundancy would dampen my mood, and yes, the stress of interviews and trying to land something quickly so we do not burn through our savings definitely weighs on me. But I am no longer coding all day for a living. Sure, I am grinding LeetCode for technical interviews and blanket applying to every open job in my field, but there is only so much of that you can do in a day.

Subscribe now

I have found myself in a strange position. I went from working nine to five at my job, then five to eleven renovating a house, to suddenly having nothing scheduled at all. Both Luke and I have felt that sudden freedom. Rather than sitting around feeling sorry for myself, we have poured that extra time into our next little project. I mentioned a prototype we built during Druid’s Crown development in a previous article, and now it is time to get that game’s demo on its feet. Now called Flow Strike.

Based on how long it took Luke to get the prototype up and running, I am excited to share how far we have come in just a short time.

Building on the prototype, we split tasks. Luke focused on enemies and swordplay, while I focused on levels and the overall content pipeline.

Luke and his little brother love the game TABS. That goofy little sandbox has seen endless playtime in our house, and I think it was this inspiration that sent Luke down the path of ragdoll-based movement and physics for this game. I suspect he will regret that decision eventually, since physics can be tricky to get right, but for this project, we are living by the rule of cool. A bit of physics jank will not be the end of us. So far, we have a spear-based enemy and a shield enemy, which is a big leap from the capsule-based foes in the prototype.

Subscribe now

Getting them moving has been quite an undertaking, and getting them to properly react to our sword attacks required a full rewrite of our sword mechanics. It is always fun when you spend two days writing code and, when you finally succeed, you end up exactly where you started.

For my part, I wanted to focus less on coding this time. I know that once I am back at work, my bandwidth for that will drop again. So I looked at what I could do to best help us hit those ever-present deadlines, and honestly, content production and asset pipelines are what slow us down the most.

With my free time, I worked through a few tutorials to see how others handle it. Shout out to Playable Workshop and their tutorial series. I love their format of one expert paired with one complete beginner.

We want to take the nature work we did in Druid’s Crown and stretch it into the science fiction space. Solarpunk is something we explored in our cancelled project Sons of Dagda, and it felt right to revisit that idea.

While researching, I stumbled across a term I had heard before but never truly appreciated until now. Greebles.

For the uninitiated, greebles refer to those little science fiction thingamajigs stuck all over spaceships in Star Wars. The original model makers used old Airfix model parts to give the ships extra texture and detail.

It is kind of like playing with LEGO, except all the pieces are weirdly shaped. The video that sparked this idea really clicked for me, and that is where I began. I knew levels would be a bottleneck for us, so I started with our first one. I sketched out areas to show off key features, whiteboxed to find the right flow and shape, and then greebled all over it.

It is surprisingly relaxing, and the results are looking fantastic so far.

So there it is. Work on our VR trick-based sword-fighting game is well underway. It has been a fun time, and I am excited to see where we will be in the future. For anyone with an Oculus Quest, we will be throwing it up on the store as soon as possible in a bid to gather feedback on our now two demos, so keep an eye out.

Thanks for reading. Try out Druid’s Crown and let us know what you think.

I worked in academia before moving into the private sector as a web developer. I taught web development, and although I loved it, I took every opportunity I could to teach in the games department. Getting to know the people there and teaching those students was a joy. It also gave me the chance to participate as a judge at the Student Game Jam Festival, GamesFleadh.

I do this every year now, and it is always fun. Last year, they were even kind enough to let me bring Luke along to help. This story, however, is about my first year as a judge.

Subscribe now

Not really knowing what to expect, I was excited to talk about games all day and to put my critical mind to use. It is something I pride myself on. Other than Luke, I do not have many gamer friends in my social circle, so this was going to be a real treat for me. Adding to the excitement that year was the fact that it was an anniversary edition of the festival, and game development legend John Romero was attending. Somewhat surprisingly, he lives in Ireland now.

That brought a little anxiety. Having someone of such stature in the same room as me was intimidating, but I did not dwell on it. Surely he would be busy all day, and so would I. I had played Doom, of course, back in the day, but I was probably too young to really understand what it meant at the time. I know my history now, but Doom was not truly my childhood game. It belonged more to my brothers.

I am fairly vocal about my love of games in social settings, and the games department was no exception. If anything, with a willing audience, I can be a bit over the top. So the organiser knew exactly what he was doing when I arrived and quickly informed me that not only were John and Brenda on the same judging team as me, but I would also be spending the entire day with them, one-on-one, chaperoning them throughout the event.

It was a very kind thing for him to do, and somewhat evil.

After a brief introduction, I spent the day moving from student group to student group, some of them my own students, with the Romeros in tow, judging my heart out. It was great. I instantly felt comfortable slipping into the teacher role, playing the games and encouraging the students to explain their work. What was even better, though, was how kind the Romeros were to me. We argued, not aggressively and not to win, but as people who love games and genuinely wanted the best for these up-and-coming developers. They bickered like an old married couple, and it put me completely at ease.

Subscribe now

We played all of the games assigned to us and then returned to a quiet space to fill out the judging sheets.

Getting to argue with one of the greats of game development is a bucket list item I did not even know I had. I still look back on that day often with a smile. Despite the gap between our levels of experience and success, being allowed to stand toe to toe with one of the greats was an honour.

It was another nail in the coffin of my resistance to taking game development more seriously as a hobby. Maybe, someday, I will be that senior developer, arguing with the next generation of up-and-comers.

A quick life update at the top: the plan was always to release the game in September, but as we approached that goal, we also hit another major life milestone, buying a house for the family. I’m sitting here now writing this in our new office space. Luke’s desk is right behind me, and I’m super excited to see how this new setup changes our game-making dynamic. I can finally annoy him with game development questions in real-time, with no delay!

Subscribe now

I took a break to finish some renovations and get us all moved in. We finally settled in this week, and it’s definitely a huge weight off our shoulders.

But that wasn’t the only delay this month. Luke had to refocus his attention on exams. He worked incredibly hard, studied his ass off, and got great results after all the effort he put in.

And then, for the cherry on top, my company went through redundancies, and out of nowhere, I was out of work.

Just what we needed with a brand-new house and a nearly ready-to-launch demo, right? So now, a quick refocus on interviewing is needed. The funny thing is, without a job, I suddenly have more time to spend on Substack and game dev stuff. So here we are. I’ll be doing a bit every day while also prepping for interviews and sending out applications.

At times like this, I can’t help but wonder, is this the off-ramp into full-time game dev? Could I take the jump now and go all in? Realistically, no. And that’s okay. I like working as a developer, and I like the lifestyle it provides for the family. Maybe the next career change will be the one. But I hope that Luke will have the chance to make that jump before I do. If I ever get that moment, it’ll just be the cherry on top.

Subscribe now

Now, back to Druid’s Crown and the demo launch. I had one big task left: the fourth character, always meant to be the mother of our four playable characters. We don’t have concept art for her, but that’s okay; we made do with the real thing. Like the father and son characters, she’s modelled after one of our family members. A quick blonde ponytail later, and we have our fourth character, modelled after my darling wife.

Luke pulled together the trailer and cleaned up the Steam page.

One, two, three, launch! It’s not as polished as I would’ve liked, but it’s definitely a thing.

Download Here!

We’ll let it sit for now, gather feedback, and work on improving this core slice before moving on to the game's larger content. Please try it out.

Subscribe now

I’m a web developer, and I love my job, creating things people use, tackling technical problems all day, and working with great people. It’s a good job. But my true passion is game development.

Since I was young, I’ve dreamt of making my own games, crafting stories, and designing adventures. Gaming has always been central to my life. For as far back as I can remember, we had PCs and games consoles in the house. My Dad was great at bringing home the latest tech and gadgets.

My earliest memories are of the point-and-click era—Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer. I remember watching over my brother’s shoulder as he played StarCraft and Final Fantasy VII. During my teenage years, I led 25-person raids in World of Warcraft (a game we played as a family, which ultimately expanded our family when my brother married one of our guild members).

When I needed an escape, games were always there for me. And as I consumed more and more of the medium, my appreciation deepened, and so did my desire to participate. Now, I get to do that with my son.

Subscribe now

I’ve always been good with kids, but like everyone, I had no idea how deeply becoming a parent would change me. Teaching him to talk, to walk, to care for others, those moments were full of wonder. But what surprised me most was how ready he was for all of it. Luke was sharp and curious, always reaching for more. In that sense, I got incredibly lucky.

Becoming a father at 18 meant I had time on my side. No career pulling me away, no packed schedule. Just free days with him, we made the most of them. I remember sharing my passions as early as I could. Minecraft at two years old might have been a bit optimistic, but we stuck with it. He watched me play a lot in those early days, and by the time he was four or five, he really locked in. We played LEGO Marvel Super Heroes and played the hell out of it. Collected every character, explored every corner, and finished every side quest. That game kicked off a golden era of couch co-op that is still going strong. If there is a kid-friendly, adult-engaging co-op game out there, we have probably played it.

I think animation was our first creative foray into computers. Stick figure animator had been an early creative outlet for me, so I figured it could be one for him, too. He took to it fast, creating hilariously long, epic fight scenes that still make me laugh.

Looking back now, I have no idea how I pulled it off. My middle child is fast approaching the age where I first started working with Luke, and it's got me scrambling to remember how it all began.

As I continued my own education and eventually fell into teaching, I started sharing bits of technical knowledge with him. Just small things I thought he might find cool. Never for long, and never too detailed. I wasn’t trying to teach him outright, just gently steeping him in the world I was growing into myself. By the time I finally had space to pick up game development, after years of training as a software developer, we were ready.

Subscribe now

Together, we coded. I taught him Scratch, GameMaker, Unity, Dreams, and Godot. Whenever our attention wavered, I’d change the approach, always trying to keep us moving forward. The Nintendo Labo was a particular highlight. That thing was made for kids like my boy. Eventually, he was eight years old, confidently messing around, making mistakes, laughing at them, and proudly sharing his creations with anyone who would watch.

And then, something wonderful happened: he grew fast. He became confident with a computer, started solving problems on his own, and developed interests and skills that surpassed mine.

We settled into Unity, and we made solo and collaborative prototypes. We started an annual tradition of doing game jams over long and stressful weekends. And through it all, Luke picked up the skills he needed. So much so that he beat me to the punch. He achieved one of my life goals before I did. It took months, and it was hard. But he managed to make a full game and release it on Steam all on his own. I actively did not help, almost cruelly so; I play-tested and pointed out bugs and steered him towards solutions when needed, but not a single line of code, piece of art or mouse click was mine. That was important to me.

Grapploteer is a puzzle game that shows what this young man could do all on his own, and it nearly broke him. It was a joy to watch the weight of wrapping it all up fall down on him, and being able to be there to motivate him to the finish line. Long-distance hiking and making a video game, both equally gruelling and character-building for a young man, I have found.

Building on that success, we had to keep going. This time, with his skills matching mine, it was time to collaborate. Brawlberry was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream: the release of my first game. A true bucket list item checked off, and I never would have predicted how deeply it would intertwine with my journey as a parent.

Making games with your child adds layers of meaning and complexity. I’m constantly trying to find the line between parent and collaborator. The power dynamic can become interesting. I do have the ability to veto his design decisions by sending him to his room.

It isn’t smooth sailing, far from it. We clash—like colleagues, like children, and like friends. The reality of long-term development takes its toll. He has exams and friends to balance: I have a job, other kids, and a marriage to maintain.

I worry about being a stage mom, vicariously living out my dreams through my son. I worry about the demands I can put on him. I know I can be overly critical (just ask my wife). If I snap at a colleague over a piece of work, the worst that can happen is a trip to HR. But scarring your child for life because the butterfly he made isn’t flapping quite right? That’s a whole other ball game. It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly.

I worry that my "notions", as my wife calls them, such as building a game in my free time and maybe someday starting a game studio, when heard by a young, impressionable kid, could lead him to an unrealistic and punishing path. I want to prepare him for the worst while also supporting him for the best.

Subscribe now

Still, even in this complex dance between roles, parent, collaborator, mentor, critic, I’m not navigating it alone; my wife is the anchor I rely on. She couldn’t tell you a quaternion from a vector, but she can tell you very quickly when I’m being an ass. She’s had to put up with us speaking our own little language as we built this hobby between us. I trust her to keep me balanced. If Luke inherited his game dev skills from me, he got his kindness and compassion from her.

I don’t know where it’s going long term, but I expect him to go to college for something in computer science, he will chase girls and meet game dev friends who he wants to collaborate. I don’t know how long I can keep this going; maybe he will rebel as all kids tend to. But I intend to enjoy every moment while it lasts.

Game development is my passion, but these days, every evening after work, when I’m too tired to turn on the screen or think, he moves the needle one step further, and inspires me to do the same. What began as my solo goal has transformed into a shared dream.

And I couldn’t ask for a better partner.

Subscribe now

Something happened since the last post that I just have to talk about. Luke and I spend a lot of time talking about games; it’s our shared language, and keeping the creative muscle firing is a big part of generating good ideas. So, as we come up to the launch, it was a bit of a surprise when, during a run in the nearby woods (prime ideation time), Luke bowled me over with an idea so good it made me question the last few months of work on Druid’s Crown.

Subscribe now

Now, part of this is the fact that coming up to the end of a sprint, as we are now, I hate the game we’re making. That happens pretty often in game development, I think. I can see all the problems, but I can’t see the fun anymore since it’s been playtested to death.

But when an idea hits, it hits. As I’ve said, pitching game ideas back and forth is common between us. But this idea was so simple and so clear that I instantly thought: should we drop everything and just make that instead? He pitched it like this:

With just that, I knew what he meant immediately. Maybe it’s our father-son bond, maybe it’s our shared game knowledge, but the idea of a trick-based swordfighting game in VR instantly had its hooks in me. Imagine: you throw your sword into the air, it spins, you spin, you bounce it off a wall, you jump and catch it, all building up a combo that powers the sword to deal massive damage. Genius.

VR is an odd one. We’ve got a Quest 3 and a Quest 2 in the house. We’ve tinkered with VR development: I played around with a language learning app until Noun Town beat me to the punch, and then we both worked on a VR adventure game inspired by Irish folklore and point and click classics. Both had merit, but VR games really only take off when they lean hard into what VR does best. Beat Saber is the perfect example. Slashing through blocks is fun on its own, and adding music makes it unforgettable. Limited movement, no solid impact, instant immersion. That’s why it’s the biggest seller.

We always said we would only make a VR game if we found that one mechanic that just works in VR and is fun on its own.

Luke finally found it.

So we did what any responsible game developers trying to hit a launch deadline would do: we took a break from our main project and prototyped it. Maybe it was just a fun idea in theory, better to test it and move on. Big mistake.

It’s fun. Really fun. I’ve never felt more like a badass ninja. Borrowing a page from Superhot, we added slow motion while the sword is out of your hand. Luke coded a trick system that makes adding new tricks easy, plus a dash mechanic. Boom, prototype done.

But what now?

We noodled around, making new tricks by just trying cool stuff in-game and attaching tricks to it. Then we looked back, a little forlorn, at Druid’s Crown and went back to work.

But fear not, it won’t end there.

Jonas Tyroller has a great video about “plumbing the market” with multiple games to discover which ones have real commercial potential. We’re not overly worried about money, but of course, we hope our games do well. Releasing the Druid’s Crown demo is a step towards finding out if it’s fun enough to pursue further.

Funnily enough, Luke dug up his old YouTube channel and started making shorts, the same ones I’ve been posting here on Notes. The Druid’s Crown cinematic video? About 238 views. The two shorts he made for the VR sword game? Both have over 2,000 views. That’s a strong signal that, at the very least, the algorithm prefers one over the other.

So, while we wait for feedback on the Druid’s Crown demo, we’ll double up. As soon as the demo is out, we’re switching gears to make a demo for the VR sword game.

Game development is a fun hobby for us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take it seriously. We want to make someone’s favourite game. We’ve gone down wrong paths before, and staying flexible is key. Either way, the learning never stops.

Subscribe now

For now, though, focus: Druid’s Crown has potential. I’ve seen the fun in it, even if it’s hard to see right now. It deserves our full attention. The Steam page is live, and the next article on Druid’s Crown will be about its launch.

Wish us luck, and thanks for reading.

It has happened again, another stall in the progress on our couch co-op 3D platformer inspired by Irish mythology. We are still aiming for a September release of the demo.

But this time I have a really good excuse, even better than the last break, which was due to a hiking trip with my son.

After many months of paperwork, hard work, and nail-biting patience, we finally bought a house. Housing is a huge issue in Ireland right now, so the fact that we managed to get onto the property ladder is a massive deal for us as a family. Because of the crisis, we ended up buying an older house that needs a lot of work. That is why last week’s article and this week’s are delayed. I have spent all my annual leave and every bit of spare energy cleaning, sanding, painting, and generally trying to get the place ready so we can move in and begin the next chapter of our lives.

So, there is no game development progress or insight this week, but I can talk about the environment where we work.

Currently, Luke and I develop in our own rooms. Displates cover our walls, and I have a collage of random photos my wife slowly adds to whenever she prints some. We both use standing desks with multiple monitors. I work in the office, and he works in his room. We usually keep a Discord call open, and often I will call him into the office so we can brainstorm on the whiteboard together. I love whiteboarding.

In the new house, things will be different. It is slightly smaller, and until we can convert the garage into a dedicated room for Luke, he will be sharing with his little brother, which means no PC in that room. So the office has now become the central hub, and it might end up holding three computers since my wife also works from home. Because this house is essentially a teardown and rebuild situation, we actually have the opportunity to design a workspace that fits our wants and needs. Exciting times.

We are spitballing ideas, maybe cubicles or personal corners we can decorate, though the shape of the room might make that tricky. One thing Luke and I bond over is admiring the setups of some of our favourite game dev YouTubers. For example, DevDuck has a clean, minimal style with lots of fish tanks. I have a big tank of my own that will definitely be included. Another favourite is ThinMatrix. We love his mix of tech and greenery. So plants are a must. Basically, we are aiming for a solarpunk-inspired office space: tech, nature, and creativity all woven together.

Being in the same room is something I am both looking forward to and dreading. I want to work on games in that collaborative style, peering over the cubicle wall to ask a question or share a thought. But he needs his privacy for gaming with friends, and I need downtime and a place to hide from the family when I want to get deep work done. Noise-cancelling headphones will probably be on more often here. Another aspect that changes the dynamic is having the office room more central to the house. It is the first door when you walk in and is connected to the main living room through some doors. I am happy that my wife and other children have easier access to us, bringing us more into the flow of daily life in the house. But as a programmer, of course, I want to disappear into the proverbial basement to get my work done. We will have to see how all this pans out.

Subscribe now

It will take time to get there, but I am really excited about building an environment that helps us create in the way we want to. And it could not come at a better time, with us changing our development from demo creation to content creation and spinning up into the real development on the game.

Next week we'll talk about the demo launch and progress on the game, I promise. Thanks for reading.

I am a big fan of annual traditions. We did not have many that I remember as a kid, but the few we did have, I have kept going into my own children’s lives. What I have ended up doing is creating traditions of my own. The hope is that these touch points become things that will always bring my family back together as it inevitably grows apart as the kids age, and maybe even get passed on to the next generation.

The annual Harry Potter rewatch at Christmas, the Lord of the Rings marathon each summer, co-op games on release, snacks on a long hike, and a swim in the ocean, no matter the weather (but especially on New Year’s Day). I love a good tradition.

Having just returned from the annual father-son hike, I lament the second year we have missed the GMTK game jam. Last year, it was the wife’s birthday, and, though traditions are important, her birthday took priority, of course. This year, we had a gap to go on our hike, and I had to prioritise touching grass over staring at screens for three days straight.

A game jam is basically an all-out sprint to create a full game experience over a set period, with a theme announced at the start to dictate the game to be made.

The GMTK Game Jam is the biggest run by one of the larger game dev YouTubers out there (his videos are an immediate watch for us in this household). You submit your game in the timeframe, and then you play and rate other entrants’ games while others do the same to you. The top 100 is played by Mark, the GMTK owner, and he then picks his top 20 to be put into a video. It is a dream of ours to someday make it into that top 20 spot.

Luke and I have done six in total, and watching the coverage on YouTube of this massive game development event has me waxing lyrical about the game jam as a medium of expression.

We have been working on Druid’s Crowns demo for five months, and when it comes to a game development cycle, we are in the polish and launch phase. It has been a slog to get here.

A game jam takes all phases of development and compresses them into a faster cycle, resulting in, hopefully, a small playable experience. This means that when it comes to learning the different aspects of game development, such as ideation, planning, implementation, polishing, marketing, and launch, a game jam gives you exposure to all aspects in one neat package. It is a perfect and safe way to practise these different aspects without too much commitment, and failure is almost encouraged.

And so, once Luke was old enough and had some basic skills, we entered into this maelstrom of creation with enthusiasm. At the end, we proudly stood over “Berzerker”, our first game jam, and the start of a fine tradition.

I will say the game jam experience is fun, but it is more of that type 2 fun that hiking gives you. Stress is high, the timer is going, and you can easily bite off more than you can chew when it comes to the size of the game you decide to make. Making a game is work, there is no way around it. I have been known to be short with the young man, especially when his work was a little bit more sloppy than it is now, and I was doing more of the heavy lifting. But still, I remember each game and look back on them fondly. They are touch points in our game jam journey, the stepping stones we took before making larger titles.

Subscribe now

And so if you're reading this and are new to game development, get out of tutorial hell, join a game jam and take a shot. We failed a few of ours, and they are the ones we joke about and remember the most now.

My father is retiring this year, a big shift in his lifestyle, but I am ready for it. He will be out walking with us and straight into game development alongside us. I hope that when I am his age, Luke will give me that call each year and ask me to do a game jam with him and his kids. Then the effort it took to get the tradition going will be paid back tenfold, and if not, I will have made the most of the time we had.

As I get older, I’m getting better at resetting when I fall off the habits I want to keep, whether it’s running, game dev, or anything else. I can feel myself drifting away from the path I want to follow, and an instinct has started to form. It’s the need for a restart, a refresh, a return to the things that make me happy.

For some reason, this has become somewhat ritualistic: a swim, a shave, a sauna, cutting my nails, cleaning the fish tank, rewriting task lists from scratch. These have all become triggers for what is, at its core, a ramp-up back into living an organised life. I think I’m naturally an unorganised person, so building this skill as I’ve grown older has been super important to me.

When it comes to raising Luke, I try to instil the idea that it’s not all or nothing. It’s about getting back to it before too much time passes and it no longer feels like a natural part of your path.

Game dev is such a long journey. It’s kind of mad to think you can maintain commitment and discipline nonstop for extended periods. The ebb and flow is the art, and it’s not just okay, it’s encouraged.

And so, back from holidays, I’m back to Substack with this update. Having just landed back in reality, I took a day to recover, and now I’m here in front of my PC, planning. So again, no progress on the game just yet, but the wrap-up stage of our game is still ongoing.

The demo is due in September, and we have ground to cover.

Subscribe now

So for this to work, what has to happen?

I sat down, turned on the game and played what we have.

A couple of bugs, nothing major, that can be easily knocked out in a session of coding.

Bugs:

• Wind noise is cutting in all the time

• Moving the camera sideways into the branch clips

• Land noise on tree sounds like rock

• Vines on tree platforms clipping

• Up/down on flying seed too much

• Shadows too dark

• Tutorial writing for a 2D camera

• Settings scroll and squished

Next up is the content that needs to be done for the demo to be “Done”

Some of these are smaller pieces of work, easy to see how to do them and easy to do. Mostly, this focuses on the trees’ decoration.

Tree Decoration:

• The altar for the seed on top of the tree needs to be done properly

  

• Dust particles on tree growth are too basic

• Checkpoints need to be added to the new tree

• Birds/butterflies

• Nests/bees

• Decals

• Tree vines

• Trunk edge decoration

• Smaller Foliage

• Tree stage title (Use Ogham writing for that tree type)

  Subscribe now

Next up are the larger items left that take a bit of thought and effort

Music

The game’s audio has been progressing as the game has matured, but we still don’t have a “Theme” for the game. We know we want backing ambience influenced by Irish instruments, and I have had some conversations with musicians in this space, but for now, I need to find some copyright-free examples of what we need.

Characters

Our characters are rough at the moment; the models themselves in no way represent the awesome concept art that we have. We are also missing our 4th character, the “Mother”.

These designs were always meant to be iterative. We mainly wanted to get the four characters hooked up and playable. Now that we have this ironed out, we need to put the work in and upgrade them to the standard set by our concept art.

Another issue with these characters is the animations; again, they are more placeholders than attempts at the final product. One interesting approach I would love to try is the idea of using some sort of mocap to get us closer to our indicative animations faster, not just in this game but in general.

Story Poem Barks

Having got lost in the land of poetry, I have settled on an Irish-inspired structure for our poetic dialogue, which will both hint at our story and also help guide the player.

The form is called a dán díreach, and I’m learning as I go here. I have the things I want to say for our demo written out now, and I’m slowly turning each one into a small 4-stanza poem using this syllabic form:

Steam Page

Surprisingly, we earned a bit of money this month from our previous games, Brawlberry and Grappleoteer. This wonderful 86 euro payment will now pay for a brand new steam page for Druid’s Crown, on which our demo will go. This will require a lot of marketing materials, etc, but I’m excited to start gathering feedback and wishlists.

And that’s all for this week's planning.

We know what our next month will look like, Luke’s taking a little break to work on a VR prototype he had an idea for that seems promising as a possible next game to work on after Druid’s Crown. So it’s up to me to get through as much of this list as possible. Wish me luck!

Subscribe now

This week (and maybe next week), I have no game updates, no witty thoughts on nerd culture, and not even a bad meme. This week, I’m not on my computer (except to write this quickly before bed). We are in a caravan by the beach in the Kerry Mountains, recreating a childhood that I enjoyed, for my own kids.

We have a week of no technology, no distractions, just hiking, playing in the sand, swimming, board games, and a lot of book reading. So far, we’re three days in, and I’m exhausted. Keeping all three kids and my wife happy, combined with the sea air and extra exercise, is taking its toll. But I’m excited for this week as a punctuation to a great few weeks of writing on Substack and working on the game. It cannot be all go go go constantly, and going out and touching grass has all kinds of benefits.

Subscribe now

I love my time making games with Luke, but I have been looking forward to this. At the end of this week we are hiking for three days with hiking bags, tents, sleeping bags, and lots of laughter. An annual occasion that helps remind me that although this pastime of gaming and game development has brought me and my family together, it is not the only way.

Until I return, Slán go fóill.

This week has been a blend of familial fun, poetry, and collaborative design. If every week were like this, I’d be a happy man.

Luke and I are currently remaking the levels to be more interesting. Specifically, this means building in branching and multiple action paths. Creativity has been flowing from all directions. Inspired by playtests with my two boys and my niece and nephew, some chaotic 4-player co-op shenanigans nudged us into this redesign. Meanwhile, in the background, I’ve been musing on the narrative and unexpectedly finding myself pulled into the world of poetry and what it could mean for our game.

Subscribe now

Playtesting with the Kids

My sister’s kids are fairly close in age to Luke, and being in our family, of course, they’ve been thoroughly infected with as much nerdy goodness as possible. So whenever we get the chance, they’re roped in for 4-player playtests. This is the environment the game is built for. If I can’t make it fun for these four dopes, why bother at all?

It had been a while since all four played the game together, and while babysitting, we seized the moment to get fresh feedback. What surprised me most was just how much fun they had. They’ve played games we’ve made in the past, but this was the first time I left them alone after observing for a while and came back to find them still playing.

Somehow, over the past few months, we’d done what we failed to do in our previous game: we made something fun. Sure, they eventually broke the game and started playing a hacked-up version of prop hunt when they ran out of content, but still, I got a bit teary-eyed watching them. If there’s anything to make me grateful for this hobby, it’s hearing those laughs and shouts echo through the room.

Writing Dialogue as Poetry

Weirdly, that wasn’t the only time this week my emotions got the better of me (since becoming a dad, this seems to happen a lot more often). I had written some poetry for the game’s intro and shared it with a friend (The Living Philosophy), who’s knee-deep in stanzas at all times. His reaction, along with that of another friend, was so positive that it made my day.

In conversation, we stumbled onto the topic of Irish poetry. It has such rich history, and specifically the Aisling poems that frame Ireland as a beautiful woman, a symbol of renewal and longing. That sparked something. What if the game only spoke through poetry? Both Irish and English. What if the co-op players had to translate between each other, like a father and mother sharing knowledge with their children?

Subscribe now

That thought excited me. So, I started listening to more poetry.

Patrick Rothfuss has his character Kvothe from The Name of the Wind say that “poetry is just a song without music”, and until recently, I felt the same. But that’s shifted. While driving out to a work installation through rural Ireland, I threw some poetry on YouTube and played it over the radio. With nothing else to distract me, I listened.

And it hit me hard.

Bit of a strange vibe, going from deeply moved by Yeats or Heaney to professional developer mode minutes later, but I managed it. I don’t think I can do what the greats do, of course, but listening to them has at least shown me what’s possible and made me want to try.

Side by Side Level Building

Finally, the last bit of development this week was building levels side by side with Luke. That’s rare for us. We usually work separately on Discord, quietly encouraging or mocking each other across our respective tasks. But this time, we had one PC, two monitors going. One with the game running. One with the editor open. We took turns playing and dropping in level elements, slowly sculpting a series of branching paths up a gorgeous new oak tree that Luke had built.

The levels feel more varied, more natural, more alive than any we’ve made before. All the tools we’d built over the past year finally seemed to click into place. There is more work to do, of course. But this way of working unlocked something new in both of us. Less friction; more creativity.

Closing Reflections:

This week has been a quiet revelation.

Creating in the open, with the kids, with poetry, with each other, has reminded me what this whole thing is for. It’s not just about polish or pipelines. It’s about laughter from the next room. It’s about being moved by a verse on a rural road. It’s about sitting next to someone you love and building something neither of you could make alone.

The poetry is helping me think differently about dialogue. The playtests are helping us design with joy in mind. And the co-creation is helping this game grow into something more than we expected.

There’s still so much to do. New levels to build. More story to write. Systems to test. But if the path forward includes more weeks like this one, I’m in no rush to reach the end.

Until next week

Hi, I'm David, and this is my place to talk about what I love most: making video games with my 14-year-old son, Luke. Last year, we released a roguelike called Brawlberry. Now, we’re working on an Irish-themed couch-coop 3D platformer called Druid’s Crown. This is where I share how it’s going and nerd out about all things games and game dev.

This week is all about learning. I love learning a new skill. There’s something about being bad at something and knowing nothing that appeals to me. I get to research, and I do love research, I want to know the techniques that are used with the best equipment, etc., and once I have all that, I get to practice with no shame. “Sure, I only just started.”

And then, as time passes, I get that RPG levelling-up experience. Increment by increment, I get to see my progress. Eventually, I get to the point where I’m “okay” at something. Rarely do I reach mastery with my interests since I subscribe to the 80/20 rule, but that initial rush of a new hobby is the reason I have so many.

This week, I got to indulge in some learning for 3D modelling. I’m a bit out of practice with the skill I built during my college years, but specifically this week, I needed to make some hair. Our characters up to this point have been a bald man and a young man with short hair. Our third character has large, silhouetted curly hair, not something I knew exactly how to approach without turning her into a bunch of square noodles.

Subscribe now

And so, tutorial city. Usually not my favourite place to be, but with an approach decided on by the tutorial, I got the basics and then started to experiment. I’m pretty happy with my first attempt.

I love the term “autodidact.” The internet has opened up a world of learning, and all you need is the desire and the follow-through to pick up whatever you want. I’ve learned guitar, singing, juggling, 3D modelling, Spanish, weightlifting, running, swimming, hiking, camping, programming, editing, game design, DIY, and countless more from YouTube videos.

My wife complains that I’m easily distracted by a new hobby, and she’s not wrong, but that’s not the whole of it. I’m consumed by a new hobby. I ravenously devour all I can, and once I hit a certain level, I’m happy to move on to the next thing. I never really drop the hobby (which is why, again, I have far too many), but the hunger dies, and I become a master of none.

This year, it was swimming for me (aside from this Substack, obviously). I’ve always been a strong swimmer, with lots of water sports as a kid. But lengths of a pool? Not my strength. I never saw the reason for it. But with some weight to lose and swimming being so low-impact, it became my focus. I got some assistance from a triathlon colleague and watched all the online tutorials I could, and over a year, I got semi-ok. I can now do more than one lap without stopping or drowning. I was swimming five to six days a week for a while there, to put my obsession in context.

This love for learning is something I try to exemplify with Luke. When it came to learning programming, I was less worried about him understanding what or how a for-loop works. I wanted him to understand how to get the answers for himself, learning to learn. This was done mainly through cruelly asking him, “Did you Google it?” every time he asked me a coding question. I could have given him the answer, but look at him now. He’s telling me to Google it!

Subscribe now

This is one of the main benefits of working in the technology industry: it’s constantly changing, the problems are all varied, and you need to be constantly learning. I’m glad I haven’t got bored with it yet, or the bills might get a bit harder to pay.

That’s all for this week, some musings on learning, Luke spent the week fighting boredom while building a settings menu, our list of fixes for the demo has reached the single digits!

Warning up top on this one, lads, it’s rough, first attempt at something like this. Next one we will improve on audio and handle the review mixed with the Dad and Son Reviews a bit differently.

Dad’s Review

Okay so my review of A Short Hike.

First of all, the vibes were class.

Initially, when I saw the pixelated 3D graphics I was kind of put off if I'm honest. I don't really like that art style, but in combination with the animations and the ambient sounds and stuff like that, I really sank into the vibe as the game kind of continued on.

In those first few moments, like grabbing the glide and feeling how that feels to move around the world, felt really good.

Talking with all of the characters wasn't tedious, which sometimes it can be. You're kind of mashing X to get through conversations sometimes in these kinds of games. Each of the pieces of text was very, very short and kind of nice and digestible. Short conversations, but they add a lot of character to them.

And when you did multiple conversations with the same person, it seemed to have a lot of iterations, which was nice and reactive. I like that.

The world itself was very nicely built, especially when you started getting golden feathers. You felt like almost overpowered in the amount of flight you had. So your ability to explore and navigate the world just expanded so much as soon as you got those golden feathers. Which was really nice.

I don't know how scalable that would be in a longer game. And that's something to point out. The size of the game helps an awful lot to how much of a quality package it is. I don't necessarily know that this would scale out long-term. There might not be enough mechanics and stuff like that.

But I enjoyed exploring the world.

I especially enjoyed the very last part. It was almost like a puzzle where you couldn't just walk straight to the top. I had all the golden feathers I could want, but there was a little bit of a puzzle of just, oh, you can't go this way, you have to go that way. So it was just like one last barrier before you got to the finish line.

When it comes to the story itself, I liked all the interactions and the dialogue for sure, but the final scene felt like it was trying to land a punch that I didn't quite understand. It didn't land quite the way I felt like it maybe should have.

This could have been a symptom of me not talking to enough people and getting a good context for what's happening in the story.

But yeah, I like the idea of having that kind of emotional payoff in the end, and like flying back down to your, I think it's your aunt or something like that. The end was a nice kind of circle of the story.

But that actual phone call on the top about your mother and surgery — I wasn't really sure what was going on there. It felt like it was supposed to have more emotional weight than it did.

Overall, awesome game. Super liked it. I loved how short it was, and the vibes are just top quality for sure.

Definitely worth the playthrough.

Subscribe now

Lukes Review (Weird Audio at the start)

So this is my short review of A Short Hike.

So first of all, I imagine they could do a lot pretty easily since it's so simple.

I was honestly surprised by how good the movement was. Because I knew something about the game before I started playing. I knew it was kind of like artsy. So when the movement was actually good, I was kind of surprised by that.

I didn't get stuck very often, which is good. Some of the puzzles I thought I'd be stuck on them for a while, but they were pretty straightforward, but not too easy, so I still had to think about them, so it was a good balance of difficulty, I think.

Music was amazing. Like it was, it was really good.

The dialogue was like, I feel like it was kind of, it was pretty realistic. It was pretty funny as well at certain times.

The golden feathers mechanic was, like, it was really good for making you explore. I also liked how you didn't have to get all, like, you didn't have to get, like, ten feathers. You only needed, like, seven, I think. But I went around and got more feathers anyway. Like, I think I got ten. Yeah, I got ten feathers. And I know I didn't do everything in the game, but I think I did most of it.

I liked the treasure mechanic as well, where you had to dig things up.

I'm trying to think, is there anything I didn't like about the game?

The ending section in the snow is kind of unclear, where I had to go. I was wandering around there for a good bit. But the thing with the feathers freezing was pretty cool. Like a way to mix it up.

And that ending flight down the mountain was just, that was amazing. Like getting to fly over everything you've seen and then landing back at the cabin.

The inventory system, I didn't really engage with that. I don't know if there was like things to be done with that. But I basically only ever used it to equip the shovel.

And yeah, I think that's everything I have to say about the game.

Subscribe now

We have a lot to cover this week, with many plates spinning, and all the while, the game inches closer and closer to a demo launch.

Steam Page Fiasco

We originally purchased a Steam page for our previous game Sons of Dagda, which we eventually shelved. Naively, I assumed we could simply repurpose the page for Druid’s Crown by changing the name and details. Turns out Steam takes issue with completely swapping out one game for another. Who knew?

So while it looks like the change is done on the surface, we’ll need to purchase a new Steam page and set it up properly. That’s a task for the future though, not a priority at the moment.

Subscribe now

Demo Wrap-Up and Sneaky Additions

Polishing the demo has begun to wear on our young developer. Classically, he quietly started implementing a few new features, very cool ones, mind you, but not exactly on the schedule.

This led to a whiteboarding session where we sat down and catalogued everything we wanted to fix or improve in the demo. That session gave us a tangible finish line and clear goals. We've been working through those ever since. Well, mostly.

Luke, being Luke, has since gone off script again and created a new tree and mechanic. And I have to say, it’s good. Surprisingly good. It captures the childhood feeling of climbing a tree in a way that our old one completely missed. Honestly, it’s so much better I’m considering deleting the old version entirely.

Even though it’s not part of the plan, these creative detours have injected much-needed energy into the polish phase. We started with 33 items, and we’re now down to just 14.

Platforming Design Philosophy: Artistic vs Systematic

Many conversations this week have centred around one core question: what makes a good platforming level?

This sparked an interesting revelation about the differences in how Luke and I approach design. His style is intuitive and exploratory. He dives into creating, letting curiosity guide him. I, ever the programmer, want to systematize the process, break down the mechanics into variables, explore combinations, and iterate toward the fun.

While out on a run, we landed on a great analogy to describe our approaches:

• Luke’s Artistic Approach: Imagine designing an obstacle like mixing a colour. Luke would mix a unique shade of purple for each obstacle, tweaking and tuning it by eye and feel until it was just right. Then he repeats the process for the next one.

• My Mathematical (Correct?) Approach: I want to build a matrix of all possible colour combinations, essentially a colour palette of obstacle types generated by a tool. When it's time to design, I pick the closest match and fine-tune from there. No mixing from scratch each time.

There are merits and flaws in both. Luke’s method allows for unique organic creativity but may miss easy wins or create inconsistencies. My method ensures coverage and efficiency but risks becoming sterile or over-engineered.

I hope we need both. Platforming is the second to second mechanic in Druid’s Crown. We can’t afford to get it wrong. Once we’re through the polishing checklist, we can iterate together, blending both styles to elevate the design.

Subscribe now

Podcast Launch: Player 1, Player 2

Big news, we are just launching our podcast Player 1, Player 2, a three-part experience. Here's how it works:

• First, we both play the game, and each game is picked by alternating hosts.

• We each record a quick review separately

• We then trade reviews and host a roundtable discussion to reflect on the game, its design, and how it relates to our work on Druid’s Crown

It’s just an excuse to play more weird games together, and the first episode has already been a blast. The recording setup still needs some fine-tuning (apologies for the audio quality), but we’re having fun. The first episode is up on Wednesday. I have no idea how often we will do them. If our thick Irish accents are a bit much, transcripts are available too. Check it out.