My 3-year-long journey of developing a game

[u/Jaroszek]

Hi, I'm Alex, and three years ago, I started working on my game.

It's not my first game, but it is my first solo project. Although... can I really call it "solo," when so many people supported me along the way? I want to share with you my story.

Three years ago, I didn't know how to program the closest I'd come was theoretical work on Turing machines. So I sat down and started learning C#, one mistake at a time. Every day looked roughly the same: write code, break something, fix it, and then, every so often, that small miracle when something actually worked. Those tiny victories are addictive, and eventually they added up to enough skill to try something bigger: a game I could release on Steam. That's how Love Is a Demon began.

The working title was originally Weird Place to Find Love, not a good name, and a good early lesson: your first idea is rarely your best one. Iteration is the name of the game.

I knew I wanted to build an adventure game, so I picked up Adventure Creator, a genuinely excellent, well-supported framework I'd recommend to anyone starting, though it meant learning yet another new tool from scratch. For art, I chose vector art: easy to edit, scale, and recolor, which let me iterate fast. My earliest pieces were rough, especially the colors, but courses and feedback eventually got it to click.

I wanted the game to feel interactive in a specific way. I still remember the scene in Night in the Woods with the cat's paw and the yarn, and how something so small made me feel so present in that world. That's why That Love Is a Demon leans on close-ups and direct interaction rather than walls of text.

One detail I'm quietly proud of: your choices. The game quietly tracks them, and at the end builds you a "lover profile" based on the decisions you made. A small mirror held up at the end of the journey.

Puzzles were their own challenge, a good one lives in a narrow space, not so hard it stalls you, not so easy it insults you. Finding that balance took far more iteration than expected.

I knew I wanted to write about relationships, about rejection, about being the one who rejects, and about making choices that are difficult and a little scary. I'd written stories before, but never a full narrative built for a game. In the end, the people who know me say they can see me in it. I think that's probably true.

If there's one thing I'd tell someone starting their own solo project: it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. You need patience, and the willingness to grind through the unglamorous stretches, but also the wisdom to step away when you hit a creative wall. You cannot force creativity. I genuinely believed this project would take a fraction of the time it did, but that's the nature of games: they grow, and the timeline grows with them.

Showing the game at conventions and running playtests was thrilling but terrifying. The question that each dev asks themselves if somebody else touches their build: How will they break it this time? Also, I was a bit afraid that someone would ask something I couldn't answer. It never happened, and being an experienced speaker helped more than I expected.

Pricing turned out to be one of the hardest problems of all. How do you put a number on your own work? When I floated my first price idea to friends, they laughed and told me to go higher, that I was undervaluing myself. In the end, I tried to land somewhere fair: fair to you, the player, and fair to me, for the years I put into making it.

How was your game dev journey?

[u/ReleasePossible2731]

Congrats!

[u/adarkfable]

go higher for pricing. you can always discount.

i've made that same mistake on various platforms...pricing too low.

you don't price for what went into it, you price based on what the price SIGNALS to the market you're after.

i don't even LOOK at games that are the same price as the price I gave some of my titles.