After working for nearly six years as an engineer in a large multinational corporation (a place where I slowly felt my soul leaving my body day after day), I decided to take a leap of faith and fully commit to a childhood dream: creating my own video game from scratch.

With only my programming skills and project management experience, I started learning Unity. Very quickly, it became obvious that this was something I had to pursue. I was genuinely happy working on it. Once I had a solid grasp of the engine, I set myself a clear goal: build my very first game. Something simple, not overly ambitious, that I could actually finish and share, hoping to get early feedback and validate this career shift.

The core gameplay idea came surprisingly fast: matching both the color and the shape of an object. The inspiration came from a well-known psychological test (Stroop Test) where participants must name the color of a word rather than the word itself. At first, everything aligns, the word “Red” written in red but soon the brain is deliberately confused, like the word “Blue” written in green.

I wanted to reproduce this cognitive interference in my game to create a real psychological challenge — one where players have to “retrain” their brain and develop new reflexes. The intended result was a game that feels extremely difficult at first, but where players can clearly feel their own progression as their brain adapts. Once the mechanic is mastered, the game becomes a pure reflex and focus challenge.

The very first playable prototype was ready within a week, and the feedback from friends and family was unanimous:

“It’s frustrating… but addictive.”

I watched people fail, instantly restart, and push themselves to adapt, improve, and beat their own scores and each other’s. 

I was thrilled.

I then spent three more months working relentlessly on the project: refining the gameplay loop, creating all the assets, polishing the visuals, designing the UI, implementing an online leaderboard, adding a game mode variant… and once I felt the game was mature enough to be shared as a free demo, I moved on to marketing.

I spent countless hours recording and editing a trailer, preparing the release, creating short-form videos (YouTube Shorts, TikTok), and writing announcement posts (Discord, X, Reddit). On launch day, I released everything simultaneously (Steam, Itch.io, YouTube…) and invested a small budget (~150€) to promote the videos.

 Results after 2 weeks:

• YouTube views (total): 35,000
• TikTok views (total): 16,000
• Steam + Itch.io page visits: 1,386
• Steam + Itch.IO downloads: 40
• Actual players* who launched the game: 1
• Feedback received: 0

* By “actual players,” I mean players I don’t know personally.

I feel like I missed something. I genuinely believe the game is good. My close circle does too. And yet, despite all the effort, I feel like I’ve hit an invisible wall. I know competition is fierce, and my game is probably just one among thousands but I never expected so few people to even try it.

A lot of questions are now running through my mind:

• Why is nobody trying my game?
• Is the quality simply not good enough?
• Did I choose the wrong path?
• Should this childhood dream remain just that - a dream?

Sorry for the long post. I’m not seeking attention, I just needed to share my story. If you’ve been through something similar, I’d genuinely love to hear your experience and feedback.

Hoping the echo of the void will eventually fade.

Cheers

Curlyy

Keep at it! I am still working my career job but have the same goals/hopes. 

Unless you are the next Hollow Night or Silksong(Popularity Wise), yeah... If you worked to get enough cash to support you a few years to develop the games you want while providing for your physical needs like house bills, food, water like Team Cherry did; then no.

Beyond that, I'll give your game a shot.

Feedback on your game video:

You make the mistake on your video of showing the intro, and game name first. People don't care about that - they want to see the game being played - and that only starts 11 seconds in. My impression was that the game looked like fun, but the game elements were too big and too bright for me (which is a personal preference). 

If you read reviews on young people's games - they like bright lights, flashy things and screen movements. If you read reviews on casual games sites - those players (who are often retired) hate bright lights, fast movement and flashy displays and don't ever shake the screen! I also avoid games with those features because they hurt my eyes and give me vertigo.

I'd suggest you:  

• Upload a browser version (even a demo) so people can try it without having to download it.
• Port the game to mobile and publish it on a major app store. It appears to be the type of game people would play on their mobile devices rather than PC. 
• If you port the game to mobile, you can also submit it to Unity to help with marketing and advice.  

If you were unhappy in your job, quitting that job was not a mistake.

Quitting before you secured a new job however, was not very wise. Unless your skillset is one of those where you will get a new job without effort.

If you had the pocketmoney to pursue your dream job, all good. But if you were financially struggling and try to make a living out of creating video games, as a beginner, you are out of touch with reality. Not only would you try to make a living, but independantly. You would have had more expertise to go freelancer in your old profession.

Creating games is art. And as with most arts, the artists are usually struggling. With platforms to self publish and engines like Unity, it is super easy for hobby game developer to saturate the entry market. Which means free games, a lot of games and the paradox of "indie" games on Steam being usually successful. Those games are the exception, the ones that are professional enough to be accepted on the platform. But it does not guarantee success, as you can push most things onto Steam with a little effort if you self publish. And as you have seen first hand, there is no entry bar at all for games on Itch. So they have "over a million" games. They do not. It is a million projects in the game category. If you remove the double entries and the joke projects and super bad projects, unfinished projects and so on, you might be left with 200k games.

Why did people not download your game? Because they have to download it, and it looks like a mobile or browser game. How many of those did you download last year or ever? (Games that look like they should be a browser game). Except for testing out the competition.

Reminds me of the Tempest games. (I did not play your game, nor watch your video). I remember playing one with more colors and music. But it is still an "arcade" game. Those are not very popular, compared to streamable horror shocker games. Funny that. I would have guessed otherwise, because of the short attention span arcade games require.

Now that you know programming, you might want to create something with your existing expertise in engineering. Crafting games are popular. Like, the most commercially successful game ever is Minecraft. If you want to create another arcade game, maybe look here for inspiration. For fame https://itch.io/games/top-rated/tag-arcade and for commercial success https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/tag-arcade .

But if you do this as a hobby, best you do what is most fun to you. Trying to make a game that is successful as a goal is just as soulless as any other job. Maybe even more so for an artist.

Yes big mistake 

I feel there's a very real and crucial question: Do you have enough money to support game development that might go for a long time without any revenue?

Of course, pursuing your dreams is absolutely right, but survival comes first.

The only person to judge if you made a mistake is your future self. Keep up working, continue making games, and if you need to return to the job market to have revenue temporarely or if you need to leave it on a shelf forever it doesn't delete the fact that you did a game.

I get it, the revenue is paramount, but the feeling you had doing it is also priceless. Too late for remorse anyway, go forward no matter the direction.

What you need to do:

1. If you want popularity in this site, make nsfw/queer/lgbt/trans games and promote them on TUMBLR (but I personally will never make those kind of games)
2. Even visual novel with static images will make you more popular than your Warp Mania
3. Always make your games playable in browser
4. Make games based on itchio's popular tags (pixel art, horror, etc.)
5. Keep it as a hobby. Never ask for money if you are nobody with mediocore dev skills
6. Dancing/doing challenges on tiktok live will (absolutely) give you more money than selling games. Keep that in mind.

If you can make money selling games, might as well hop on it.

Hello!

I quit my software job recently, too. But I have long discounted the possibility of living 100% off my games. It is a dream. But I continue to pursue making games for fun, with the optimism that I could at least generate $50 a month from it.

Before I made the decision to quit, I made sure my finances were OK and that a more frugal lifestyle could be supported by a part-time job doing something less soul-crushing.

I have been making games since 2009. I have probably made $5,000 off of them in that time. Granted, my stuff is a little more "out there" than most.

I wish you luck. I hope that you can find peace in the world and nurture your game development skillz! Maybe I will check out your game!

Usually people quit their jobs after their dream project makes them money to safely live off of, not before. And quitting in this economy? I'd probably just go back to applying to jobs again and promote your game when you have free time. Being at a soul crushing job with health insurance, good pay and benefits is a luxury. Most people can barely afford rent.

If I were you I would pursue what makes you happy. As a solo game dev I understand how much time and effort goes into creating something and then wondering is all this worth it? I struggled with this same debate, do I quit my job and game dev full time because I know it’s almost impossible to build the games I want to build by doing it in my “free time” or do I keep working my 9-5 so I have stability, but sacrifice being able to work on the game or games I want to build? I think it’s probably best to slowly transition from one to the other. It’s probably not going to happen overnight unless you are putting out a masterpiece that you’ve spent the last 10 years developing 🤣 but slowly your smaller games start to do well and then it starts becoming realistic that if you saved a little and got a few more games out when you release the game you’ve always wanted to you’ll already have a following of people that love playing your games. So the to answer the question was it a mistake? Probably, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t one day going to make it as a game developer! I wish you good luck and hope you keep developing 🙂