The long way round

Rent’s Due is my first game and the demo is out now on my itch.io page. Though the path getting here was not as smooth as I would have liked. I’m assuming that if you are reading this, it is many years down the road and I have somehow actually made some successful games. And you are someone looking back through my old logs to see how someone went about doing it (that’s what I have been doing with other blogs at least). Or none of that happens and no one is reading this and this was a great excercise in journaling. Either way, whether for you or for me, this is the mistake ridden path I took to get here.

Straight to the wrong point

All my life I have been playing video games and I always wanted to make one but never knew how. I ended up making a board game to try and scratch that itch. It was a lot of fun but not quite what I was looking for. I then decided it was time to try and make a game. First I had to trick, err I meand find, someone who would take my amazing ideas and doing all the hard work of coding and doing the art while I got to kick back and be a genious making the big decisions. For some reason, no one seemed to think that was a good idea. I then made the decision that I guess I would have to do it my self.

So at the end of 2019, I started to learn to code… and I loved it. I was a philosophy major back in school and symbolic logic was one of my favorite classes so it came to me easily. Who have known that brain logic and computer logic are really similiar. And after spending several months learning, I was finally ready to make my game. The prevailing wisdom is to work on small games to build your skill set. I took that to heart and thought… but what if I just skipped that step and made a BIG, SUCCESSFUL game immediatly. I could skip all the crap other people were wasting their time on.

That began the journey of a game called two faced. It was puzzle plateformer where you could only see certain platforms based on whether you were wearing a mask or not. It had 5 or 6 different areas all with unique mechanics and art styles. It has the movement section where the masked changed platform movements. It had a laboratory where you could control rats and chemical reactions. It had a gravity section and several other outlandish ideas.

To make sure I didn’t let scope creep get the better of me, I also wanted to add a mystery element where the story took place in a mansion and you had to figure out which one of the family killed the grandfather to get his inheritence. You would collect pages, like how you get strawberries in Celeste, and those pages would give you lore and clues of what was happeneing in a mansion and then you could question the family members and at the end, you could guess the criminal. My favorite part was that you could be wrong and the story would just end that way.

I’m sure youre thinking that I was able to finish that game without a hitch and you would be close. I made a shit ton of levels and and mechanics, never made any art and made a super long demo. I loved the game but it was so much work and with no clear end in site, I got burnt out. I put game dev to the side for a long time. Good thing I skipped the small games step or I might have actually finsihed something. It took me a long time to get back into game dev seriously.

Around the end of 2025, I felt the itch again but this time decided to go about it differently. I studied coding more seriously so that I could feel less hindered when trying to make something. Once I felt I had brushed up on my skills enough, I started with the goal of just making prototypes. I had a long list of games that I thought would be fun to make and I just started to try and make something that resembled them.

I made a prototype that was a necromancer version of vampire survivors. I learned a lot on the project but I decided that it just didn’t have the sauce the way I was doing it. I scrapped it and moved onto a new one after a month. I then started working on a incremental rougelike that was like cookie clicker but with a lose condition and random upgrades. I didn’t love this idea at first but I figured it would be super easy to make and get something playable. And it was pretty easy. I gave it to my friends to play so that I could check it off the list and start on the next one, and keep getting better. My friends were very nice and played it and gave great feedback. Then the next night they played it again without me asking them too. And the next night. And the night after that. They just kept playing it so I decidided to just keep upgrading it so that they could keep enjoying it.

So instead of moving on to my next game, I kept developing this one and decided to use it as a way to learn how to do a project from beginning to end. I fleshed out the gameplay and added art (first time for me and that was a neat experience in and of itself). I expanded features and starting working on roguelite element. And that game became… (drumrolllll) Rent’s Due! I’m really proud of it beacuse it’s something that I have seen all the way through. I didn’t completely stick to only doing small games but this game is managable and can actually be finished by just me. I learned my leason but it doesn’t mean I learned it all the way ̄_(ツ)_/ ̄ .

Get in there!

Now, I would’t take advice from me if I were you, but you’re not me, you’re you, so maybe I can trick you into it anyway. My path in game dev has been riddled with mistakes and hindsight forehead smacks. But I could have only learned those mistakes truly for myself by jumping in and doing it. So don’t worry about messing up and just jump in and get your hands dirty. Oh and make small games is actually really great advice.

If you are so compelled, please check out Rent’s Due and play its demo. If you are as I have predicted reading this post ten years after its conception, wave at the flying cars going by your window and subserviently say thank you to the A.I. overlords that have ineveitabley seized control of our every waking lives :>. Thanks for reading and safe internet travels.

• Kevin