Now that it’s been over two months since I left my job to pursue this new career path, I thought it was high time I wrote an update!
For those who just want the highlights, please feel free to read this TLDR
A TLDR
- Quit job in software engineering because I wanted to do something more creative with my life
- Fleshed out some initial ideas I had for a game
- Built some technical prototypes and now designing core game functionality around a “Plan”, “Play”, “Reflect” system
- Next up, further prototyping and building out game until I’ve got a production quality demo
- Planning to do this Devlog updates once a month
[From the great 1998 Jackie Chan film, Who Am I?]
For those who don’t know me, hi, my name is Tom, and after fifteen years of working in the software industry, I quit my job to have a go at video game development.
It’s not quite as big a leap as some people might assume.
Before starting my career in software, my degree specialised in Game Development as I had originally planned to work in the industry but was turned off when I found out how poorly employees were treated.
Fifteen years on, I found myself at a job where I was building systems I just didn’t care about, solving the same problems day in and day out.
It wasn’t until I started prototyping game ideas in my spare time that I found myself enjoying development again, scratching a creative itch I hadn’t realised I’d had.
That was when I finally decided it was time to move on and set up Ashpaw Games.
After a lot of preparation and planning, I finally made the move in December 2025.
Ok, backstory sorted, let’s move onto what I’ve actually been doing for these past two months.
As this update is going to cover a number of topics, I’m going to split it up into three sections:
What have I done?
What am I doing?
What am I planning?
After leaving my job with a game concept I wanted to pursue, I wanted to start by gaining an understanding of how other studios might approach building a game.
While I’ve operated under a number of different software methodologies before, I’ve never been responsible for everything from initial conception to product release.
After reading a few articles and books, I’ve decided to go with what’s outlined in “A Playful Production Process” by Richard Lemarchand.
It’s worth noting that as a solo indie developer, not all of the book is applicable, but the high-level phases do make a lot of sense:
While I was still employed at my previous job, I was very much in the ideation phase experimenting between a couple of different concepts.
Since moving to working on this full-time, I decided to carry on playing around with some of them for a few more weeks till I settled on this concept of a haunted charity shop.
One of the key values I’d like to instill into any game I make is a sense of Britishness, and I think as a location, it could work well with British dark humour (think Channel 4 comedies).
After settling on this concept in mid January, this had let me move into Preproduction.
To me, this phase is all about answering and locking in all the unknowns.
By the end of preproduction I should fully understand:
As stated in A Playful Production Process - I’m Designing by Doing, and one of the core outputs of this phase is a production level vertical slice as it helps you answer all of those questions.
Once I move into Production, whenever I have a question I should be able to look at the output of preproduction and go “I know how to get that done”.
Given my predisposition to the technical side, the rest of January was spent doing some spikes in Unity around how I might structure and build my game, experimenting with different patterns.
Right now, I’m leaning quite heavily towards using something like VContainer to help me split apart my game’s source of truth as plain C# code from artefacts in the game space such as MonoBehaviours in Unity.
To that end, I’ve got a small technical prototype where:
This is nothing like what the end game is going to be or look like, but I wanted to evolve some of my earlier ideas into something a bit more concrete that I can build on.
With a technical prototype in place that I’m happy with, I’ve now moved onto the actual Game Design.
While I have built small games in the past, whether at University as or as side projects, they’ve always been terrible.
Full of cliches, copy paste from other games, there was just no thought put into the design of the actual gameplay.
That’s why I’ve been spending time reading “Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach” by Michael Sellars.
It’s been a fascinating read and chimes with previous experience when building non game related complex systems.
If I was going to sum up what I’ve taken from it in a few short sentences it would be this.
A fun game is one that’s easy to learn, difficult to master.
It’s built on levels of complexity, with different game systems working together in balance, to give a holistic and fun experience with the system as a whole.
That doesn’t mean games that don’t do this are bad.
It just means they have to rely heavily on their content, whether that’s an excellent story or simply mass amounts of it.
For example, I love both Limbo and Inside. They are great games, but they aren’t complex and offer little replayability.
Another key value I’m trying to instill into my game is replayability, which is why I’m heavily invested in a systemic approach to my game design.
As a recap, this is the concept for the game:
Manage a haunted charity shop, where even the most meticulously crafted plans can descend into chaos.
Identify haunted items, plan your shop layout, and hope to hell you got it right.
In other words, the donations you receive and have to sell have the potential to be haunted, and you as the player, have to try to sell some of these items while ensuring the safety of your customers.
Too many injuries and/or deaths increase the supernatural threat level of your store, which in turn raises the suspicion of the local authority.
To try and create a game system from this, I’m trying out a “Plan, Play, Reflect” alongside a roguelike experience, where learning by failure is a requirement.
As you arrive at the store to start your day, you need to first sort through the donations that you’ve received overnight and try to work out what potential supernatural threat they could bring to your store.
Given how well you can deduce these threats, you can then plan your store layout to help you deal with them.
Once you’re happy with your decisions at the plan stage, you open the shop doors and have a timed experience of play.
How well you set up in the Plan stage will either make this challenging or almost impossible.
This is where I’m thinking of the Overcooked element, specifically how can we invoke chaos in a fun way!
The player has to choose between serving or defending customers and is potentially hampered by poor planning.
At the end of the day, when doors close, this is all about deciding what went wrong and which upgrades could I purchase that might make tomorrow a bit easier.
Do I need to invest in additional help with the store? Do I need a skill upgrade that helps me mop up faster?
Right now, I’m focussed on building out some ideas for the Plan system which I’ll mention in my next update, which neatly leads onto…
To round off this first update, I wanted to give a sense of where my head is at in terms of what I’m starting to immediately focus on and what my long-term plans are.
For the next few weeks, I’m focussing on building out some prototypes for the high-level game systems I discussed in the previous section so I can start play-testing them and see if they’re actually fun or whether I have to pivot to a different system design.
Longer term, especially with milestones, I’m aiming to try and get out of preproduction by the second half of this year.
As I’ve never built a game before, I’ve no idea if that’s too long or too short, but I do think it’s important to have at the very least soft deadlines so I can reflect and pivot if needs be.
I’ve also been considering go-to-market strategies for the game, but until I’ve fleshed out some of the details I’ll keep those initial thoughts to myself.
For those that are interested in this game and/or my new career choice, hopefully this update has been of interest to you.
The whole purpose of writing updates like these is to both let people know I’m actively working on this while giving myself a sense of direction and progress.
To that end, I’ll be aiming to do these updates about once a month, showcasing what I’ve been working on.
If there’s a topic I feel I’ve got more to say on, I might do the additional post where I can deep dive on a topic.
Until then, adios!