Making a game with a stacked deck

After starting the year by making a lot of progress on personal goals like being more active and reading my first full book in over a decade (I know… I’m trying to get better!), I’ve had to refocus on game dev in a very crunch-like manner.

Crunch in game dev is where you have to work a lot in a short time, often having to neglect friends, family and health. It’s dumb, and always feels weird to talk about as many other industries deal with similar hours & focus as part of their normal job.

I have a lot of feelings about crunch, it’s always a bad idea but often leads to “better” games “faster”. I say this with the biggest caveat in existence, if you ever have to crunch you should own a large part of the IP, profits, etc.

I only believe crunch is “okay” if it’s a personal project, I can’t imagine a scenario where it’s ethical to have a salaried employee perform crunch. As an employer I think you should be capping crunch at all costs.

So why crunch if I hate it?

An upsetting admission is that I don’t exactly hate it, I just know it’s unhealthy.

There’s a rush you only get when you see your little project advance at a very rapid pace. I think this is why I love the prototype stage, the scope is infinity. Every new thing added is a whole number of percent added to the game; the first sound effect that goes in, well that’s 100% of your audio!

This also means that changing anything can radically change the game, figuring out your game’s theme is much easier when you can swap the 5 sprites you have for different ones. Swapping out 5 sprites when you have 200 will only change the game a quarter of a percent; you won’t change anything, you’ll just shape the clay a little.

The bulk of the reason for crunching right now though is not because I’m a workaholic, it’s because I am running out of money haha.

So it’s instant noodles and beans on toast until launch.

Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll has done remarkably well for “my first indie game”, so far bringing in $23,185.73 (about £17k in UK money). That money plus my prior savings has kept me stable since leaving my previous job in Feb 2025, and if I’m frugal I can make my remaining 5k - 6k last about 6 months which gives me a hard deadline of Summer 2026.

This is good and bad, good cause it forces me to actually make the game and bad cause it means I feel small pangs of anxiety or over-think the games quality often.

The game is good! A friend who’s played it a lot since the start of dev said so which makes it true!!

It’s becoming easier to see the shape of the thing I’m making and how it isn’t just imitating previous games in the score attack deckbuilder genre. There’s still quite a few very familiar elements, but they’re remixed around a novel mini-game of chance.

It’s still a relatively unknown game at 137 wishlists, so I have to begin actually marketing with shorts/reels/etc and a few youtube videos. The only thing stopping me is the worry that I’ll fail to get any attention, but I think I just gotta do it scared.

2000 wishlists is apparently how many you need when you enter Steam Next Fest to get the best chances, so over the next 26 days I need to gain 1863… That’s about a 1350% increase in a single month.

Making indie games does feel like the deck is stacked against you, at least in regards to the odds of success.

One of the things that calms me is that if the launch does go badly, I’ll do what I did last time I quit to make my own games; I’ll go get a job1, save up and then try again with all the knowledge and experience of past attempts.

New Wunder Stuff!

If this the first you’ve heard of Wunder you can find out more (and wishlist… pls) on the Steam Page.

The first major change is that the map of events you venture through are now fully proc-gen around a ruleset I can alter for each river. The previous map was hard coded so it was a non-trivial task getting the code set up to make random and fun maps

Each section is a row of events, by toggling the event buttons it adds that type of event into the possible pool of events that can spawn. There’s some hard-coded duct tape to force 2 shops with a possible 3rd, but it’s mostly managed with this tool.

There are more plans for the river generation, but I make games by constantly improving the weakest part, and the map is no longer it… but that means something else is!

I’ve finally implemented Mana which is Wunder’s version of Score Multiplier, you can gain it in a bunch of ways, but it clears at the end of the turn unlike Overpower and Armor that carry over.

All four elements are also now in the game!

• Fire is volatile doubling both good and bad scores.

• Water is basically always helpful granting a small chance to flip a coin a second time.

• Air is a good support that can be used to flip better coins again

• Earth will basically skip the discard pile so you can potentially keep redrawing it every turn

I’m still unsure on Earth, but as I start building out Coins and Talismans that use the discard pile in different ways it should become more useful.

Above you can see the new Discard Plate in action, it doesn’t fully fit the game, but it’s far better than the temp art I made before. It’s now what I consider to be shippable temp art haha.

The coolest part of the new discard plate is that it’s not a pot, so now you can see every coin you’ve discarded physically. It’s a really nice thing to look at and instantly gauge if a coin is or is not in the deck.

I’ve also done actual production stuff this month and tasked up everything needed for the demo. I’m very responsible!

I’ve made solid progress on my 2026 goals; been more physically active, bought a new jacket and read the aforementioned first book, I’ll pop my feelings about it below (bare in mind I’m not a huge fan of blizzards games so I may be overly harsh).

It’s a great summarised history of Blizzard Entertainment, all of the good things (very few) and the bad things (so many) the company did over a 30 year period. It’s wild just how greedy the execs were, almost from the word go. Seeing how deeply parasitic Kotick was in his effort to increase annual revenue, shows just how detrimental the growth mindset is to the act of creativity.

After reading it I finally feel able to mourn the Diablo franchise, knowing that a sequel to Diablo 2 was never really on the cards, and never can be, as Diablo isn’t a Blizzard game. The philosophy of “Games are better played together”, runs counter to the lone hero amidst a grim dark fantasy setting.

Some goals have changed2 and speaking of grim dark, the Environment Art goal has changed from a single piece to a smaller coursework challenge. This will involve building out a new fictional grim dark world with science fantasy elements. I’ve been planning it for a few years and already have 3 games prototyped in it, but there’s a distinct lack of art / concept art for it. This should help me learn to draw as I won’t be worrying about “what” to draw as much.

I’ll return next month with a (hopefully not too desperate) plea to play Wunder in the Steam Next Fest :D

Have a good Februrarerorary!!