Joy of Crafting Joy - Solo Game Developer Journal #1

Greetings Journal! (And to you, dear reader)

Today is the 3rd of June, 2025. The time is 7:59 AM and I’m sitting here in our cottage, next to the lake. I decided to take a long look at the view, even though I’ve been looking at it for the past 8 years of my life. For some reason, it looks different each time. Little islands in the distance seem to change color, depending on the weather. But also, the color of the lake keeps shifting each day.

I took a short run right after I woke up, I think it was around 3 kilometers or something. With that energy, I did a little workout while the sun was rising on top of the nearby trees. Which invited me to plunge into the lake. It was cold, somewhere around 13 celsius. But oh boy, what a way to start a day!

Now I’m sipping my coffee, which is like a tradition. I like to do it in peace and listen to the ”Lofi Girl” playlist on Spotify. I feel that this tradition has been built so strongly in me, that it would even feel a little weird if I’m not able to do it.

"To keep the game authentic and to offer an experience I want to deliver, I need to let go of my own expectations of the outcome."

Today, I have a course to teach. It’s about ”Software modelling and design”. It’s starting within an hour, so I have plenty of time to feed the kids since they are already on their summer vacation. Two of the kids wanted to sleep in my car and the third, next to me.

I’ve been building my new game for less than a week now. For some reason, it ended up becoming a fishing game. I actually have no clue why, it just felt right and interesting. Also, I’m learning to make pixel graphics for it. I want it to feel as retro as possible. Which will ultimately lead me into learning 8bit chiptune composing as well. Pretty sure I will be trying to do the music with Garage Band on my iPad. I still need to figure out how I can get that kind of sound out of it.

It’s been rather fun to build a new game from scratch. Seems like I’ve learned so much from building the Seeker: Quest. That given project became such a massive project, but the blessing of it is that I’ve learned to handle a big amount of complicated code. Or to be precise, I did not learn to ”handle it”. I just learned to manage it a bit better.

Yesterday I had an interesting discussion with a person, who is finding ways to make games solo or within a very small team. This person asked so many good questions about being a solo game developer and I feel that I was able to deliver the answers that I wanted. Since this is such a broad field, it’s always nice to try and put these thoughts into words. Especially, if there is someone listening and throwing their own ideas and thoughts into the soup.

"Why minimalistic? Since if I don’t focus on doing that, the projects will become massive."

This discussion enlightened me more into the direction that I should just build games. Sounds rather obvious right? But actually, it isn’t. At least for myself.

I spend so much time thinking about what type of game I should build, or is this given project ”the right one” or maybe I should do something else instead. I guess it's good practice, until a certain point. But in the end, the reason why I make games is because I love the process. If I start overthinking it, it’s the perfect recipe to kill the whole joy of it. And if I successfully kill the joy, it’s rather hard to build anything interesting for the (possible) players of it.

To keep the game authentic and to offer an experience I want to deliver, I need to let go of my own expectations of the outcome. I guess the most important factor of solo game development is to try scoping the game into as minimalistic a game as possible, which is still able to deliver that ”feeling” I’m after.

Why minimalistic? Since if I don’t focus on doing that, the projects will become massive. And when projects become massive, they either become 50 hours of unpolished content that does not feel like anything. Instead, I’d like to offer 1-2 hours of experience that feels authentic. But also, offer that ”clear experience” for the player. So that they don’t have to guess and learn what this game is about. It should present that immediately, within the first minutes of gameplay.

With this fishing game I’m building, I feel that I’ve discovered a rather simple and fun coreloop, but also a style and ”feeling” that can become something very interesting. And also, all this built in a way that I can actually ship it with required quality.

Interesting to see where this road takes me! But right now, it sure is a fun one to discover further!

The time is now 08:22 AM and I better start wrapping this up to feed the kids before the course.

I wanted to try a little different approach for blog writing, as. you may have noticed (if you have read the previous ones). Let me know what you think about it! You can do it in my Discord channel. Use the #guild-house channel, or just PM me! (you can find me as the admin with a nickname: Kossad) https://discord.gg/Cb9hY8y

Have a great day! You’re awesome! <3