the emotional journey of making a videogame

Transcript under the cut.

What if we made a Bad Game? What if we made a game that isn't trying, at all, to be a big hit? A game that does something just... alright. What if we made shorter games with worse graphics?

When I decided to try to be an indie dev again, I decided that I wanted to try making lots of... "bad" games. I mean, I don't literally mean "bad"; it's not like I don't take pride in my work or that I don't want to make a good game. It's just -- I felt I needed a period of exploration to find a niche that I liked, that I was good at, that I could make my own in-house productivity tools for. I wanted to practice a strategy similar to Spiderweb Software, one where you focus on a specific niche, roll out lots of low-cost but good-enough-quality games, and focus on getting income from the long tail. But, before I could do that I felt that I needed to find the right niche by experimenting with making short games on a budget.

making the demo

The first niche I wanted to try was Hidden Object games. It didn't seem technically challenging to me and while the genre was crowded, I felt that it had become relatively saturated with soulless asset flip games devoid of an interesting story or setting. I missed hidden object games from the flash era like Morningstar, a game which continues to be seared like a nostalgic fever dream into my adolescent memories, and I felt that trying to bring that back to the genre could help me stand out.

The idea was to make a game about loneliness where you worked on an abandoned, broken space station orbiting a black hole, trying to keep it online so you could send supportive replies to messages from lonely people in your inbox. You would eventually fail to repair the station and spiral into loneliness yourself, only to receive back the messages you wrote.

I thought that would be so cool, because you're tricked into learning the process of cognitive reframing, something that I had learned in therapy. What would a better, more supportive version of me say? Something positive that I could say and also accept? I felt the twist, this realization, could genuinely change lives for the better.

So, I sold Tanuki, my close friend and artist of no signal, on the game idea and we got to work. It wasn't long, just about a month of preproduction, until a prototype had been designed and we committed to a six-month timeline to make the game.

We settled on a design where you could move freely in a 3d setting, without colliding with anything, like a noclip camera. I hadn't really seen a hidden object game experiment with that aside from maybe I Am Dead, and I thought it might be fun to experiment with and become another way to differentiate myself from the crowd.

Early on, when just a few of the mechanics were implemented, I did a few playtests. The feedback was positive, which was great! But, the game wasn't complete technically, so I stopped in order to focus on building out the demo. I wouldn't do playtesting again until the demo was almost complete -- which happened just short of three months in, right on time as planned. The hidden object mechanic was implemented. The writing mechanic was implemented. It was time to playtest again! And... the game wasn't fun.

Almost universally, players would find themselves stumped upon encountering a text box. No one wanted to write. No one even knew what to write. Players didn't know the other characters well, so they felt that they couldn't write anything and -- unlike the wonderful game Kind Words -- they had not been primed to respond to strangers. The story didn't propel players forward through the game as I wanted and the mechanic that I hoped would tie everything together failed, leaving players lost and leaving me with a game not much more than a box of pieces that needed to be glued back together somehow.

To make it even worse, now players also kept asking: "This is an escape room game -- where are all of the puzzles? There should be more puzzles, the game is a bit boring without them."

I was making a hidden object game, not an escape room game! But, it was clear. I made a game that was bad. It hurt, but I needed to pivot. The core premise -- the foundation of the game -- just fundamentally didn't work. The writing mechanic had to be removed, puzzles needed to be added, and somehow... I needed to rewrite the entire plot of the game to make sense. This definitely extended the timeline past six months. To a degree, it felt a bit like I had to start over. But, we kept working on it, out of sheer momentum.

a better demo

We started showing the game at a few events, like the ATX GameMakers Showcase and Arcade and STAPLE! Austin.

Meanwhile, I... stalled... on the story issue. I needed to come up with a diegetic reasoning for why reading is necessary to help you fix the station, or... something else that would move players forward. But, I couldn't think of anything.

Five months in, the demo was almost done. Most of the assets for the entire game were made and assembled into scenes. But, the story still sucked! In playtesting, which I had kept up this time around in order to avoid making the same mistake as before, I largely still had to tell players how to get through the demo. It was then, in the course of talking to my girlfriend at the time about how bad and terrible my game was while watching a playtest, that she made a suggestion that made me feel like I finally understood how to make the game "good", actually.

Finally, this time around, rewriting the story felt like everything was falling into place. I started to notice that when I took the game to events, like Austin Glitch State, Delta H Con, 2D Con, and San Japan, I didn't have to tell people what to do anymore. I could just sit back... and watch them play.

Eventually, we finally released the demo on September, 9 months after pre-production completed, 3 months after our original deadline, in time for Steam Next Fest.

Now, we just needed to finish the game. I was excited! I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. We kept showing the game at events like Fantastic Arcade and Toronto Game Expo. Meanwhile, the game got closer and closer to completion.

Before long, a whole year passed, but that was okay. You see, I saved up enough money to do this for three years and the game was getting so, so, very close... but, politics happened. The political environment, especially in Texas, continued to become more hostile to people like me.

I didn't feel safe anymore, and I found that affecting me more and more. I felt increasingly unsafe. What if I couldn't get hormones anymore? I already had bottom surgery done, so if I couldn't get access to hormones my health would be in danger. What if I got arrested for going into a restroom? What if I got a felony simply for existing?

I was fortunate enough to have a choice. After all, I saved all that money to pursue my dream. I could cut short the pursuit of my dream and instead use those savings to move to safer waters before it became harder for me to do so.

My ability to focus on the game dissolved as I found myself asking: Where should I go?

the last mile

They say it's the last 10% that takes 90% of the time. Emotionally, that felt very true with no signal. The game was completely playable from beginning to end when I suddenly went on hiatus to move to California in March 2025.

I was in a completely new place, without friends or connections to local communities. I found myself in a temporary housing situation while I looked for a "real job" and a more stable place to live under the good graces of family connections. Because it was only supposed to be temporary, I didn't even have any of my stuff other than what I could carry on the plane and I didn't even have my cat. I needed to find a new, stable place to live and, most of all, I needed money. I need a job.

I still worked on the game from time to time, but I wasn't really working on it full time like I had before. To be honest, my heart wasn't really in it anymore. It was hard to make a game about loneliness with a happy ending, when you find yourself extremely lonely and depressed. Most of my time was spent looking for jobs, and it wasn't going well.

But the thing I found the most frustrating was being so close to being done with a game... and then not being able to finish. I found myself showing off the game at GodotCon. It was... weird to be there. I had applied for it when I was still actively working on the game, expecting that by then I could go to the event and show off a complete, released game. Instead, I was showing off a game that wasn't done and I also wasn't trying to finish.

I considered taking a break from job hunting to finish the game, even if it was only just to put a newly completed project on my resume so that I could at least point to what I've been doing since my last employment.

So, we put the final pieces together for the game until we could finally release it on July 25th, 2025 at 21:00 UTC.

(overlapping)
exodrifter: Five, four, three, two- oh, we're not in time at all
Chotto Kumitte: Cinco, quatro, tres, dos, uno

exodrifter: Uh... oh, I have to press more buttons! Release-- okay, wait. Set the launch discount, blah blah blah, release right now! Confirm app release!

(overlapping)
exodrifter: Release my app!
Chotto Kumitte: John button is saying it's buttoning time.

HypnotiK_Games: That looks so good, so good.

eiffel_corn: Ah!

Valkeryias: Oh my god, look at all of them!

ZenTractor: Oo! That's what a cupola is.

LainVT: Oo! Look at this! Mysterious Eggbug plushie.

Tyumici: Uh, that might have hit me a little hard.

CreaseVT: What! Imagine if I had gotten stuck here.

azurempress: Oh! Do I have to know which simulation too? Exo!

OwenAeon: Oh, we have legs now? Wait, was that the holodeck? Wait...

FragginGamin: I don't know, I thought I was at the end before, and then I got jebaited.

(no speech, typing at the text prompt input at the end of the game)
MyriadMinds: hello deletes word your mom

InternetRain: Very good game, very good game. Exo, you did a- you did a fucking great job. You and Titanseek3r, both of y'all. Fuck yea.

On release day, I watched four streamer friends play the game... at the same time. It was a lot! But, I loved watching people react to the game's dialog and with surprise to the special twists in the game.

While we have always been excited about certain parts of the game, overall we've always thought of the game as just being... okay. So, we were pleasantly surprised when most of the Steam reviews appeared to be positive.

However, to no one's surprise, the game didn't make enough money to pay for all of our living expenses incurred while making the game. This was the expected outcome... but it was still a bummer for me. I had overspent my time budget by three times the amount, and due to the move I didn't have any more money to keep making indie games full time.

reflection

From the beginning, no signal was never supposed to be a "Good Game". Instead, it was to be the first of many games that I would publish every six months, until I found a niche I liked. But, it didn't work.

I can't make bad games, it's too hard! I get too drawn into wanting to do interesting things like, in this case, experimenting with the format by doing a no-clip 3D camera or by adding a deeply introspective and emotional story. It probably didn't even help that I spent 2 weeks working on the shader for the black hole too, which I could only make by reading a paper and porting WebGL code to Godot. But it looks so cool!

I wanted to keep experimenting like this, but the constraint of never expecting the game to do well and that I was only trying to quickly find a niche I liked held me back from shooting higher. But, and hear me out here, perhaps I already knew the niche I wanted to be in all along. I already knew what kinds of games I wanted to make, I just didn't trust myself enough.

I know it doesn't sound scientific, but I think my problem is that I need to embrace myself more. I held some aspects of myself back, because I treated the game as just a small, introspective experiment. Like, why don't I ever make games about girls kissing? Why don't I make games that are actually fun to play? Why don't I embrace my evil side and make games that feel bad to play? Why not just... aim higher, like I want to?

So that's what I need to do. It's simple! Just... embrace myself more fully. Will it work? I guess we'll find out together.

I think there's a place in the world for games like no signal, but I want to do something more compelling and with wider appeal. I want to make characters that people love, I wanna make games that people will come back to and play again. I want to be on the couch at GDQ commentating on a speedrun of a game I worked on.

So now, Tanuki and I are working on a new game. Dosimeter is a mecha shooter game where girls kiss and bugs get squish, and it will be totally fucking awesome. And, well, I'm still looking for a job, so I can't work on it full time, but I hope I can tell you more about it soon.

acknowledgements

Anyway, thanks! It was a lot, but I hope you enjoyed listening to the emotional journey I had while working on no signal. I feel like most of the time, indie developer retrospectives focus on the financial, how-can-I-be-more-successful side of things. And that's great, don't get me wrong; I'm going to post something like that on my blog soon, but I thought it would be nice to share the more emotional sides of the story here with you.

I cannot stress this enough, but even though this story is told from my perspective, there were other people who worked on the game or had an impact on it too. I literally couldn't have made this game without my close friend and artist Tanuki, the game would probably have more bugs in it if it weren't for the gracious support of Astra, the logo wouldn't look as good as it does if RayMarch hadn't stepped in, I wouldn't have anyone's physics homework to ethically plagiarize without Physbuzz, and the story might not work as well as it does without Gabby's insight. I am very happy to be surrounded by people who care, and I am very thankful for their support.

If you want to support me financially, so I can go evil mode on game dev, this is probably as good a time as any to tell you know that my 2026 birthday sale is live right now. This is actually the first time anything I've self-published has been on sale, aside from launch sales. I don't normally like the idea of putting things on sale. I know it's accepted and expected, but it feels cheap, impersonal, and manipulative to me. But, I think doing a sale every year on my birthday feels respectable enough to me and, I mean, I need money, so everything is 20% off, or 30% off if you buy everything at once, now and until it ends next week on itch.io or Steam.

If games aren't your speed, I also try to release music album every year on my birthday. They're free, but you can always throw me money on Bandcamp if you want.

All of these links will be in the description of the video.

Finally, I want to take some time to thank my Patreon, Ko-fi, and Discord patrons who are currently supporting me:

Skull
- Daagr
- Gabby
- Ikethepro18
- Jesse Luna
- Lain Bailey :3
- ZeikJT
Bone
- Aaron Angert
- BigLube
- Cesar Longoria
- ChiliAllGone (new!)
- Cypher Eleven (new!)
- Danita Rambo
- Nicolas Morales
- PGComai

This money helps me keep a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and a connection to the internet, which fuel my pursuit to make powerful emotional games that connect with people and make it easier for me to hire people to help me make games. I made this video for y'all, I hope you enjoyed it, and I cannot thank you enough.

I don't normally make videos, but I'll try make more in the future. To be honest, I'm still figuring out how I want to use this platform, but I really enjoy video editing. Until next time, may peace reign and your splits be golden.

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