Bumble(re)born

Hello again! (or more likely, hello for the first time)

I’m restarting my newsletter / blog after a few years because I’d like to think more about game design, and often thinking is easier when you’re writing it down.

I already think a lot about game design but I’m not sure I internalise as much of it as I’d like to… this is a long way to say I’m gonna write about game dev again!

After re-reading a few of my old posts I wish I could say Wunderwurld is right around the corner and will release next year, that is unfortunately not the case. My partner and I have worked on it a little and demoed it at a game event, but we’ve paused development as it was too large to develop with full-time jobs.

For fresh eyes, Wunderwurld is a game we’re working on in the same vein as Viva Piñata but set in the underworld focused on helping chimera-like creatures with their unfinished business; it’s cute, charming and will be a very chill game when it does land.

The game will absolutely be released one day but not yet, I have a lot of projects in folders atm and I’m hoping over the next decade I can finish each one.

2 years ago I started a youtube channel and it went pretty well, I made a few videos to try and market my first indie game, a playdate game called Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll. The first episode got around 20k views, which was a lot more attention than I expected or was ready for.

It made me feel like I should be making videos that were really good, but that took time away from making the game so I kept getting stuck in a loop that lead to me… not making another proper video in 18 months!

I’m aiming to start the channel up again this year and really make it a priority, it’s lot of work but thankfully I enjoy doing it. Unfortunately, if you wanna make games independently nowadays it’s really important to build marketing skills and realistically, most marketing is gross. I can only tolerate it if it blurs the line between entertainment and promotion, to the point where the marketing is a creative and engaging piece of content in it’s own right.

So, that indie game I was talking about making for the youtube channel. It came out on October 8th, 2024!

I was terrified it wasn’t gonna be received well, as there were bugs and performance issues. Plus the overall gameplay felt pretty niche, it was a metroidvania but with zero combat so I was worried people would find it boring.

Turns out I was over-worrying, the game landed really well with a whole bunch of people. Those early people are the main reason the game was a success, if a few incredibly kind people didn’t recommend it so much in the Playdate Squad Discord, then it might not have caught on as much as it did.

I’ve always known word of mouth is the most powerful marketing force behind just having a lot of money in the marketing budget, but I really felt it with this launch.

Another thing I got really lucky with is landing on the phrase “non-violent metroidvania”, for a long time I was describing it as a “metroidvania without combat” which made it sound like it was missing combat. Rather than the non-violence being the point, the core feature that gave it such a relaxed atmosphere.

Melos Han-Tani (Developer of the recent Angeline Era, one of my fav games of 2025) recently posted a really great breakdown of what word of mouth is, and how it can be understood in relation to selling games. You should go read it cause it’s great, but here’s a quote.

“Really, popular appeal comes down to how legible the game’s advertising hooks are to an average person and how easily they can convince a friend to try, and how often that hypothetical friend will have a consistent experience with that recommendation.” - Melos Han-Tani

That friend having a consistent experience with how you’ve described the game is really important, I’d never thought about it like that before and now I’ll never not think about it. I’m not saying you should package your art in the most digestible possible way, but the closer you get the more successful you’ll likely be commercially.

I don’t exactly want super success, I just want minimum wage (I’ll settle for a bit less tbh haha) so I’ll lean into that quality with some games and away when I want to create something more niche.

In March last year, The Playdate Community Awards 2024 happened and Echo was nominated for 3 awards; Best Adventure, Best Sound Design and GOTY 2024.

I have no idea how I got so lucky but somehow Echo won Best Adventure and Game of the Year 2024!! I’m still at a loss for words, this was my first real game and it’s the first in a whole series of games I’m making as an (obvious) homage to Zelda. It fills me with confidence and excitement for the first one to be received this well!

Ultimately when it comes to awards, I think if you even get nominated that’s basically the same as winning, a group of people feel so strongly about your game they put it forward as their favourite in a given category. That’s just so damn special!!!

One last thing, Cabel Sasser (Panic Co-Founder, who make the Playdate) called out Echo on a playdate update, I know it’s not that big a deal but it was to me and I can’t express how excited I was!

For the number lovers this is the revenue breakdown since launch.

Currently, the game has sold 4,859 copies on Catalog and another 80~ on Itch.

It’s genuinely mind boggling that my tiny little game made enough money for me to live off for just over a year.

My next game and my first proper game working with my partner (she’s making all the coins and helping out around her job) is gonna launch in early 2026, if everything goes to plan.

It’s the first game I’ve ever developed a marketing strategy for, I defo winged the release of Oracle’s Scroll and got incredibly lucky.

This time, there’s a plan for every month up until May. January has the announce trailer and an open playtest towards the end of the month, then Feb will bring Steam Next Fest! I’ll talk more in detail about this in the future.

If you’re interested in a double-sided deckbuilder where you flip coins in a game against the Ferryman, in hopes that you’ll be able to cross the rivers of the underworld and escape purgatory… you can wishlist it on steam here!

We took it to EGX Comic-Con in November and people seemed to really like it. Some people played it for over 40+ minutes and said they’d buy it that day if they could!

I’m not entirely sure why but my brain seems to be allergic to success, or at least to following up on it. Striking while the iron is hot is a very good way to build a career, gain momentum or just seize any opportunity in general.

Yet I seem to be incapable of it. I always wait for the metal to cool, perhaps because I feel if I can get attention again then I’ll really believe I deserve it. Which just might not be possible, I do have a solid chunk of self worth but it’s built on sand and is affected by the tides.

I’m trying to figure it out so I can give myself the best shot at making “indie dev” my actual career, and while there’s some amalgamation of depression, insecurity & issues from childhood that always manages to knock the wind out of my sails (wait, it was a metal analogy… knock the heat out of my iron?). I am making progress overall, I’m making the gaps between screaming into the void shorter and the quality of the screams (projects) is going up

On New Years Eve I got the idea from a friend to make a 2026 bingo card which was basically 24 resolutions (some big, some small) that you arrange on a grid with the middle spot being a free space.

I’ve done something similar (with far fewer goals) in past years and it’s helped maintain focus to build it as a checklist, even on my laziest days I’ll hopefully be able to do something to nudge one of these goals forward by 1 percent.

Some of them are a little lofty but I like a challenge so I’m giving it everything I got!

Just a few things that are tangential at best, but worth writing about.

At the end of 2024, we got 2 adorable cats called Miso & Mushroom (last name is Soup, ofc). They are both just over 1 years old now. Mush is scared of everything and he’s fully co-dependant on me, Miso prefers my partner and is very loud about everything from food to wanting playtime.

I did a talk about making Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll at a game dev event in Manchester called Platform, this felt like a biggish deal because I have a chronic fear of public speaking so pushing myself to go on stage (after 2 beers…) was tough.

It went really well, people related to the story of spending years in the industry without releasing anything, a lot of the jokes landed and I didn’t faint once.

After just over 8 years in the industry, the release of Oracle’s Scroll allowed me to quit my day job as a Senior Tech Designer and go full indie. It’s a steep drop in income, but I’m pretty frugal and I prize time way more than money tbh. I’m hopeful after the next few games I can get to a point where I sell at least 5k copies of 8 dollar games a year.

That would give me roughly min wage and I’d be able to happily support myself with that! I’m hopeful over the next 8 years until I’m 40, I can release 4 Echo games wrapping up the first chapter of that story, and a few other games like Wunder & Wunderwurld.

I’ve always considered myself a techy, futurist nerd. I love sci-fi, sci-fantasy and pretty much anything that guides the imagination towards a future society that has evolved in some good way.

In reality though, the Wozniaks are not (and have never been) in charge, we instead have a world filled with tech CEOs who don’t want to make something good, they just want to be first. They would jump into a wood chipper if they thought the next holy buzzword was in there.

Seeing what GenAI is and has become, has completely numbed the part of me that is excited about technology. In an effort to amass market share, companies have infected all of their products with it. There’s lots of things to dislike about it, but I honestly only care about one; the world it sells me as the future is a diluted, grey one, free from original thought and effort.

I find it offensive.

I don’t know the answer yet, but for now I’ve taken a stance of buying nothing that has touched it and supporting no one who uses it. It’s extra tricky when friends echo the talking points they’ve been fed by the people who need this to be a profit; “it’s here to stay”, “we just have to learn to live with it”, etc.

I really don’t agree, not out of unfair dismissal but just simple logic. Of course the people selling the snake oil think it’s here to stay, they benefit from us thinking that, but countless attempts to grow a new sector have failed when it didn’t prove to solve a problem; the metaverse, nfts, anything to do with a blockchain. It’s all speculative trash.

Ultimately, I don’t want to skip the process of making art, it’s how I learn to make better art.