I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development.
While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and benefits were fantastic. However, a dream is a dream, so I left my job in August 2024 to start my game company, backed by a supportive working wife and savings.
I did all the coding, writing and art, but purchased a few assets. I'm not good at art, but I learned to use Blender 3D and Photoshop. As an amateur musician, I composed the game's main theme and recorded two additional songs. The soundtrack is shared under a CC-BY license, including songs made by other artists.
I also "hired" my 15-year-old high schooler as an apprentice. He wants to study CS, so that was a great opportunity to show him the ropes. He was very helpful and worked 1-2 hours per week doing odd jobs. I was a tough but compassionate boss, and he learned a good deal about software projects. He also worked as an advisor ("this is cringe, dad") and gave me his Gen-Z perspective.
You could call my game an "interactive book with choices and a metapuzzle", similar to Kit Williams' "Masquerade" Puzzle Hunt classic, but with an optional puzzle. The game's story revolves around an extraterrestrial who reaches out to a tech worker through an online chat. There's a lot of hacker culture throughout the story. It's really, pardon the cliche, a love letter to y'all!
The development work was a lot of fun, but often brutally challenging... I maintained a 35-hour workweek to avoid early burnout, though I still had crunch stretches to meet my own deadlines. By the end, I was exhausted.
Writing was much harder than I imagined. While I had written a couple of unpublished short stories before, tackling a 100K+ novel in my second language was no walk in the park. I used AI extensively for "ESL accent mitigation" and searching, but there's not a single line in this game written by AI. I'm an AI enthusiast, but "AI fiction" is simply terrible!
Maintaining high spirits is really important in game development. I could write a whole book about this, but I'll just say: don't try solo game development if you expect to make money. It's one of the most irrational things for a profit-minded software engineer to do. Pretty much any other option will pay better. The motivation must come from elsewhere.
I then stopped caring about profits and built my dream game. I decided that I no longer wanted to live in a world without my game in it, and that kept me going through the thick and thin.
Most of my playtesters were previous coworkers or direct reports... With so many boss horror tales out there, few things are more professionally rewarding than seeing people who reported to you reading 100K words of amateur writing to support you! That's how awesome they are. That's something you can't get with your American Express card.
If you are into science fiction, you may enjoy Outsider. This is a labor of love. I threw everything I like into a cauldron and tweaked the seasoning until it tasted good. It has plenty of silly humor and adventure, but also a multilayered story full of serious topics.
If you decide to support Outsider, thank you! However, more important than buying the game, I'd love to see you playing it. Bringing joy to others is why I did this, after all.
