This is Black Star No. 1, a professional lurker. Remembering the days when it was hard to keep up with the 'Best of Best' posts, I’m quietly hoping OU takes flight again in 2026. This is the only community I’m actually signed up for, like a hometown. After drifting through sites like Utdae, Clien, and Ppomppu as a lurker, I naturally ended up back here. This might be a long one, so bear with me. It’s a story about failure, new beginnings, and finding a path through the answers you hear even when you don't ask. It’s basically a monologue, so please just read it comfortably. I started indie dev and released about 6 games, always ambitiously vowing to 'wreck the market' with that 'small-scale indie spirit,' but I was always the one getting wrecked.
And so, I faded away as a tiny developer nobody remembers and achieved the grand 'Clos-to-the-ed' (business closure).
I decided to go completely solo. Fine! Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple, and that became the medicine that led to Pixar and the Apple Renaissance. (I'm a pure engineering major—zero design skills—the max I can do is the level of graffiti on a wall). I figured I could use the Asset Store or itch.io for design, do the planning and dev myself, and keep making indie-style games. I tried several projects.
[Cat_Language_What_The_Heck_ㅠㅠ.jyp] I squeezed my brain to plan and develop, buying this and that... now I'm in a massive warehouse where I don't even know what assets are where.
I'd spend days finding usable assets and making prototypes, only to find the resources from all over the place were having a total 'chaos party' together.
Like a potter smashing flawed ceramics, I scrapped countless projects and accumulated 'internal injuries' (mental damage). After taking several big hits, I looked elsewhere for 10 years. I lived completely away from programming, let alone games. I was falling into a 'Qi Deviation' (losing my mind) in a dark tunnel, telling myself the answer I didn't even have to ask: 'Is it too late now?' My games were being deleted from stores for violating update policies. I had no will or reason to update them, so I just accepted it as a fitting ending.
But then, about 8 years later, Google suddenly deposited ad revenue. What? Is this phishing? Am I being used for a mule account? As an INTJ, I don't fall for phishing, so I checked... and there was unbelievable revenue in my AdMob account (not 'a lot,' but definitely not zero). That revenue was coming from a tiny game called 'Peece Maker,' the last one I made before quitting, which somehow hadn't been taken down.
(At launch, I wanted to do a small giveaway on OU to celebrate, but even that failed lol.)
Nobody_Gave_A_Crap.jyp. But then, 'fail scenes' from that game started popping up on YouTube Shorts. Among the creators riding that wave, some videos hit over 10 million views. The game became a meme and went viral (there's even a channel with over 100k subs that only makes content about Peece Maker...).
I couldn't understand it at all, so I made my own YouTube channel. I just spammed Peece Maker shorts. Suddenly I had 20k subs, videos with 10M views, and the total views hit 100 million. I thought, 'Is the sun finally shining on my life? 100M views = 100M won?'
But Shorts have a different revenue structure, and the payout was basically non-existent lol. Around that time, users started emailing me. 'I can't find your game in the store,' 'Let me download it again,' 'Are you not making games anymore?' (Of course, there were also reviews saying this game should be banned or that they'd complain to Google/Apple, while others told them to 'Relax, it's just a game'). I got a lot of persistent emails trying to buy it for pennies, but seeing my game make people laugh and seeing it shared and recreated into new forms of play changed my internal answer from 'Is it too late?' to 'Should I try again?'
I had many attempted projects and assets I'd bought, but I suddenly felt the urge to make something small—something that mirrors my current story. So I pulled out a character from a tiny mini-game I released 10 years ago.
A character I never even thought of using again. But it looked so much like me now. I wanted to make a game where even if you fail, it's not frustrating, and you can always challenge yourself to fly again. So I started. It's a simple game where the original identity—a tiny chick hero—rescues baby chicks kidnapped by a cat. But I wanted to give the character a different life. My self-assessed stats (out of 10) were: Design 0.1 (started at 0, just learned to poke around tools), Planning 2, Dev 3 (due to the 10-year gap). Still, I felt proud seeing my strength was still in dev.
I planned a lot (and as a professional negotiator with myself, I constantly 'adjusted' my goals lol). A story about starting over. A small game with its own narrative. Where failure isn't heavy. Where you feel satisfied like having a warm drink after a meal. A game that contains the words I want to tell myself. I vowed not to drop it no matter what and to definitely release it with my own color. Starting again after 10 years, there was so much to prepare and so much had changed. The first dilemma was the engine. This is important. Some geniuses make their own engines, but I'm returning from a different field of programming. 10 years ago, I used Cocos2d-x because it was C++ and easy to approach. It was fine for dev, but reacting to App Store/Google Play policies was a nightmare. If you look away for a second, you get emails about policy violations that require basically rebuilding the project. Support for In-App, Ads, and Game Services would just drop. So after comparing, I chose Unity. 1. Widely used by mobile indies. 2. Stable updates and support. 3. Fast response to fee policy issues. 4. Mostly 2D, but I want to try 3D someday. 5. They update critical issues even for old LTS versions. 6. Can't ignore the Asset Store. *_* 7. Goal is to release on Xbox, PS, Switch, Meta Quest someday. There are great open-source engines now like Godot or GameMaker, but if your goal is to 'make a game' and not just a hobby, I recommend commercial engines like Unity or Unreal. Design-wise, honestly, it was the hardest part.
2. Aseprite - If you do pixel art, just buy it. Drawing outlines or curves manually made me have a 'reality hit' (hyun-ta) for every pixel I poked one by one before. 3. Retro Diffusion (Paid AI extension for Aseprite) - Still a long way to go. I was waiting for updates, but the dev moved to a separate web subscription model. 4. Asset Store, itch.io, Humble Bundle, Fab - Watch for bundle sales or flash deals. I used background tilemaps, traps, and free assets from Pixelfrog (CC0). Same for sound. If I listed the dev process, it would never end, but here's the time ratio: Planning/Dev: 25%, Design: 60%, Sound: 5%, Screwing around: 10%. It’s a deformed structure, but that's what happens when your design stat is 0.1. In design, it was one mountain after another. The hardest part was maintaining consistency without breaking the game's life cycle. (Well, to some extent lol). After finishing 60 stages, 5 bosses, title, pause, continue, success/fail screens, in-app, leaderboards, and achievements... I knew what I wanted to say, but I felt like I was alone in a foreign country where I didn't know the language—the intent and the result were totally different.
There were many moments where the thought 'Is this it?' reared its head again.
I tried Gemini Pro, but for programming and design, ChatGPT suited me better. ChatGPT feels like it understands intent after a few explanations, while Gemini has its own strong world and sometimes talks about something else. I messed with Unity AI packages too; they have potential but aren't ready for actual work yet. But if ChatGPT-level image/sound generation becomes seamless in parallel, it'll be a powerful tool. ChatGPT significantly cut down the time spent looking up APIs and learning the new Unity engine. For design, I kept explaining my concept, character, chapters, and stages, and eventually, I reached a point where I could 're-interpret and translate it into dots' myself. One pixel at a time, it started filling up. (Seriously, I recommend Aseprite. Thinking of the time I lost drawing curves manually...)
[Embarrassing_First_Doodle_Comparison.jyp]
[Sorry_For_The_Eye_Terror_To_Designers.jyp] Here is the gameplay video. That tiny character has become the protagonist of a story with a new life in the game below.
[Protagonist_Of_This_Game.ytb]
[Starting_A_New_Adventure.ytb] I guess that's how it is. Just because you pour your passion into something doesn't mean you're guaranteed love or a reaction. But like the 'fail scenes' in this game, even if I wanted to fly but couldn't, if that challenge remains meaningful, I think that's enough. After uploading, I had 3 downloads on the App Store and 2 on Google Play. I thought, 'At least there are some,' then realized it was my 3 family members and my 2 test phones lol. But the damage is way less than it was 10 years ago. It's because I finished another game with my own color, and I have a tiny hope that I might take flight again someday. I was away from it all for 10 years. I got presbyopia so I had to get computer glasses, and my wrist and thumb are inflamed from the long hours, but strangely, I feel quite refreshed now.
"The community is deeply moved by the developer's 10-year journey and 'never give up' attitude. Users shared their own personal struggles, including a person recovering from a spinal injury, leading to a heartwarming exchange of motivational songs and even a custom-made video gift from the author."
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