It’s been a year and a half since I started Found. I’ve picked up Godot  and Blender. I’ve learned to code GDScript. I’ve created countless pages of documentation and systems for everything from enemies to inventory management. I’ve learned many lessons, more than I care to count having been the hard way. 

As I near what I expect is the halfway point in development, I’ve taken to listening to podcasts such as Indie Game Movement from Andrew Pappas. My first episode was Lessons from a Decade in Indie Dev with Leonard Stuart. The first lesson: Dont make an RPG your first game. Oh dear.

So why am I ignoring this sage advice? Why am I developing an RPG?

Let’s go back to the beginning. My first memory of playing an RPG was Final Fantasy IV on the Super Nintendo. There was a ship, the Lunar Whale, that could fly to the moon and back. I remember how, as you approached the moon, it grew pixel by pixel until it filled the screen. It was a simple trick of scale, but it worked. It was these kinds of clever manipulations of the medium that stuck with me. And how the developers used them, weaving them together to create moments of joy across a complex narrative.

Now, I’m building my own RPG. Not because I want to recreate any specific moment or memory, but because I want to explore the same feeling: the moment when gameplay and emotion converge, when a jagged moon on a pixel sky can make you feel something huge.

My own limitations as a solo developer bring me back to that moon. I can’t create something lifelike, and honestly, I don’t want to. There’s beauty in that constraint. I aim to build something gestural, something that feels more like a memory or a dream. The kind of game where you might not remember every detail, but you’ll remember how it made you feel.

So that's the birth of Found.