This wasn’t supposed to happen.
I was meant to be on holiday — time away, head switched off — but then Iran happened and flights were cancelled. Suddenly I had time I hadn’t planned for, stuck in limbo: restless, but free. Like most developers in that situation, I opened a game engine and started playing.
At first it was pure tinkering. No expectations, no pressure. Just moving a character around, tweaking numbers, seeing what happened. And at some point, an uncomfortable thought crept in:
This doesn’t actually seem that hard.
Not easy — but possible. The systems clicked. The engine wasn’t fighting me. I could see how the pieces fit together. And that led to the real question:
Could this plaything become a real game?
And if so — what would it actually take?
That question changed the tone completely. Once you ask it seriously, messing around isn’t enough anymore. You have to be honest about scope, about time, and about all the boring things that make the difference between a weekend experiment and something finished.
So I stopped building for a moment and did something that felt almost unnatural.
I stepped back.
The Shift: From Tinkering to Intent
Before writing more code, I started thinking about wasted effort.
What kind of game is this really?
What’s better to do first to avoid rewrites — and what can wait?
What skills do I actually need, versus the ones I hope I won’t need?
When do I need to learn those skills by?
That pretty quickly turned into the only sensible next step:
Research. Research. Research.
Research (or: When the Fun Part Got Complicated)
The moment I took the idea even slightly seriously, everything exploded.
If I’m actually making a game…
What software do I need?
What skills do I need to learn to use that software properly?
Is my hardware good enough?
What’s required to release on Steam?
Each question spawned five more. Engines, art tools, audio tools, builds, storefronts, legal bits, accounts, marketing screenshots, achievements, controllers… the list just kept growing.
What started as a playful experiment suddenly felt heavy. Not because it was impossible — but because there were too many moving pieces and nothing holding them together in my head.
Getting More Organised
The first thing I needed was a timeline.
What order should things actually happen in?
I landed on eight milestones, each representing a real phase of making a game — from foundations to release — with rough estimates for how long each would take. I adjusted those estimates based on the average time I could realistically put in, assuming around half the work would happen at weekends. I then shifted target dates to land on Sundays, to match that reality.
Suddenly, I had a plan.
And more importantly — it looked achievable.
Looking for Something to Anchor the Chaos
I realised I didn’t need more answers yet. I needed a way to contain the questions.
Spreadsheets felt wrong.
Notes were too loose.
I use Jira for work and knew I needed something like it.
Then it clicked.
I was already using the thing I needed.
GitHub.
Up until now, GitHub was just source control — somewhere code lived. But digging a bit deeper, I started looking at GitHub Projects properly, not as an afterthought, but as the backbone for managing the project plan. It’s free, and I was already there.
The Plan Finds Its Shape
Once I reframed things around GitHub, everything clicked into place:
Milestones instead of vague goals
Tasks as issues, not thoughts floating around my head
Issues tied to milestones
Related work bundled so nothing felt infinite or abstract
New ideas added as issues and parked for later
Nothing magical had changed. The work was still there.
But my head was quieter.
I could add things to later stages and forget about them until they were relevant. Instead of carrying the entire project mentally, I could look at it. Instead of guessing what came next, I could point to it.
Mental State: Stabilised
That was the real turning point.
Not when the game felt fun.
Not when movement started to work.
But when the project stopped feeling amorphous.
Once I wrote the plan down, the project stopped feeling vague and started feeling possible. I’ve shared that plan — milestones, hour estimates and all — in the next post.