Beginning

Background

I’ve always wanted to create my own game. Not because I believed it would become the next indie success story, but because, after thousands of hours spent gaming, I realized something interesting: none of my favorite games ever felt truly complete. Not objectively—perfection doesn’t exist—but subjectively. There was always a mechanic I wished worked differently, a progression system I’d redesign, or a story element I thought could be taken further.

I’m sure many people have had the same thoughts. Path of Exile is incredible, but overwhelming. Escape from Tarkov is one of the most immersive shooters ever made, yet often punishes players more than it rewards them. RimWorld constantly creates unforgettable stories, although sometimes a little too randomly for my taste. Then there are games like Mass Effect, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Dota 2, Civilization… games I’ve played for hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours. Every single one taught me something. Every single one also made me ask the same question: „How would I solve this?”

Eventually that question evolved into something much more dangerous – what if I actually tried to build my own game?

I can do it

The first mistake I made was thinking I could simply combine the best ideas from games I loved. Mass Effect’s world-building, Path of Exile’s passive tree and endgame systems, RimWorld’s event generation, Portal’s AI companion… the list kept growing. Obviously, I’m not delusional enough to think one person can build something on the scale of Path of Exile or write characters as memorable as those in Mass Effect. But I wasn’t trying to recreate those games. I was trying to understand why their systems worked so well and whether I could build something entirely different using the same design philosophy.

That innocent experiment quickly spiraled into obsession. Story influenced gameplay. Gameplay reshaped the world. World-building demanded new mechanics. New mechanics forced changes in the story again. I repeated this cycle so many times that I eventually stopped counting. The project grew into more than two hundred pages of documentation—not vague ideas, but detailed systems, progression loops, world generation, combat mechanics, AI behaviours, data structures, and enough diagrams to convince anyone that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. I even opened Godot and started experimenting.

And then… I stopped.

I can’t do it

Not because I lost motivation, but because something fundamental was missing. The project had systems. Lots of them. They connected reasonably well, but the game itself felt soulless. It was technically interesting but emotionally empty. After months of work I quietly archived everything and didn’t touch it for almost four months.

I’m thirty-eight years old, a father of two, and, despite working in IT, I spend as much time as possible outdoors. Fishing, camping and barbecues are probably where I’m happiest. Gaming doesn’t excite me the way it once did. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe my dopamine receptors have simply seen too much over the years. Either way, I always find myself looking for another game. 4 months of no joy have passed.

Or maybe i can do it?

Over the following weeks something unexpected happened. I got back to a project. Instead of adding more mechanics, I started removing them. Instead of asking what else the game needed, I asked why each system existed in the first place. Slowly, everything began fitting together. The story justified the mechanics. The mechanics reinforced the world. Systems that once competed with one another suddenly became dependent on one another. For the first time, the project felt coherent, whole, finished.

Reality

I’m not a game developer. I’m not even a professional programmer. My background is in systems architecture, CRM development, workflow automation, AI, marketing and web technologies. I spend my days designing business systems, connecting software together and solving practical problems. Game development is an entirely different beast.

Naturally, I did what everyone does—I opened YouTube. Every experienced solo developer gave the same advice: keep your scope small, focus on one or two mechanics, finish something simple. They’re almost certainly right. Unfortunately, I think I already have around ten interconnected dangerously complex systems, and removing any one of them now feels like pulling bricks out of an arch.

Will this project fail? Honestly… probably.

Will I spend the next couple of years building something nobody ever plays? Also possible. Until i burn out again and get back to it when i want.

But even if that happens, I’ll come out of it having learned Blender, Godot, procedural generation, animation pipelines, AI-assisted asset creation and a dozen other skills I don’t have today. That doesn’t sound like failure to me.

So, for better or worse, this blog marks the beginning of what is almost certainly a VERY BAD IDEA.

Let’s see where it goes.