When I was very young, my parents bought me a Game Boy Color and a copy of Pokémon Yellow. As a small, round 3-year-old, I lacked both the ability to read and to understand the game, yet I was very excited about it.
At night, my dad would sit for hours playing ahead and figuring out what would happen, before spending time with me the next day, making coy suggestions, “Maybe go up here, maybe go down there, maybe level up your charmander and see what happens.“
It seems I was destined to spend a large part of my childhood lost in the fantastical world that any Nintendo console would offer me. I remember being a young boy at school, proudly telling the teacher that one day I was going to design video games. And yet, at the start of ✓ Project Bucket List, I found myself fast approaching thirty, with not a single video game under my belt.
In the summer of 2025, I realised that this is probably one of the bigger things that I should make a start on. How long would it take to make a video game? Certainly more than two weeks, but hopefully less than three years. And with time-a-ticking, I got to work on brainstorming. Outside of my dad showing me how to play Pokémon, a big part of my childhood was spent lifting up rocks looking for bugs. And so, a vague, six-legged shape idea began to form.
In Bug Game, you go around your back garden catching bugs. It’s inspired by the cosy, safe feeling you get from games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and, of course, Pokémon. In the spirit of the path of least resistance, I decided to build a mobile game. So I downloaded Unity, followed a few dozen tutorials, and got stuck in.
The first version of the game is messy. You control a cylinder holding a net by moving a joystick. Tapping in front of the cylinder swings the net, and if the hitbox collides with a dodgy 3D model of a bug, the bug disappears, and you get a point. It takes me roughly a week to make. Stupendously simple, but it works, and I feel like I’ve just invented fire.
Look, I’m going to fast-forward through the development process here. Read the devlogs if you want the gossip. The game gets more and more complex, I swap out 3D models for hand-drawn sprites. I add in crafting, secret abilities, lure systems, quests, and a bunch of glitter, and it’s starting to look like a real game – like a real, actual game.
And then, in early 2026, I stopped.
Maybe it’s the post-winter rut I was fighting with at the start of the year, or maybe it was something else. Finances were tight with some changes in work, and these big adventures of yesteryear were behind me. I lost steam, but the point is, I stopped working on Bug Game.
In fact, I stopped working on lots of things. Replies from friends started piling up. Bucket List ticks slowed down. I started putting things off again. Hell, even the food I ate got less experimental.
So, I took a break. And one day, while thinking about the shape of paperclips, I remembered a web game called Universal Paperclips. For those unaware, it’s a 2017 game in which you take the role of an AI tasked with making paperclips. At first, it’s simple; there’s one button you can click, but as the player creates more and more paperclips, the game grows into a massive automatic factory, growing bigger and bigger, and using all of the world’s resources to make paperclips, before eventually exploring the stars.
It’s part of a category known as incremental games, and – for those who have played them before, you’ll know that they’re very addictive. They’re also often quite simple. I’ve been spending time working with n8n, a nodal automation platform, when inspiration hit me around the back of the head with a cricket bat. I’d create my own incremental game, with nodes.
I don’t know how to fully explain this, and it’s going to sound like I’m chatting shit, but I went from having no motivation at all to having a working alpha of a game that I built over the space of two days. I called it Parcel Game: an incremental game about building a delivery network out of nodes, which snowballs into factories, supplier networks, and world domination.
I do not know how this happened. I am trying to look back now, and there is a black box in the way of my memory. Maybe it’s because I didn’t feel so precious about this one. Bug Game had my entire childhood dependent on it being perfect. Parcel Game was just something I dived into before I could think too hard.
I took another few days figuring out some more details, mechanics, and implementing the rest of the game, but in the span of a week, I’d built something. I sent it off to a few friends, expecting feedback like “I don’t understand it” or “why is it so ugly“, and, instead, they sat and played the game for 6 hours.
Filled with dopamine at the game dev equivalent of being told “you’ve invented cocaine“, I skipped the entire QA stage of development, didn’t playtest it any further, and posted the game to /r/incremental_games.
Then, something unexpected happened. I thought that I’d get a handful of people to play the game; the goal in my head was like five or six. In the first 24 hours, I had over 1,500 players. That’s fucking crazy. And people were vocal about the game. Reams of feedback, complaints, suggestions, thoughts, and prayers.
This was all happening over Easter Bank Holiday, so instead of enjoying myself and relaxing with a nice egg, I was in cyberspace. As people played and left comments, I was there, reacting and making changes to the code.
Refreshing my analytics dashboard had me seeing players join from all around the world. People requested QoL improvements, while some didn’t understand the game, so I built in tutorials. Some found bugs, some broke the economy system, and some didn’t like that it didn’t have a pretty UI. Some loved the game. Some hated it – and from the sounds of it, they hated me too. As the feedback came in, I would jump in, make changes to the code, and update it live on the website.
The game developed iteratively and quickly over the course of 48 hours. A player who started at 10:00 am would experience a different game than one that started at 12:00, and as I patched the game more and more, more and more people tried it out. By day four, I had over 6,000 players, with over 100 pieces of feedback.
I had strangers on the internet asking me for advice on how I’d had such a big launch with essentially no work and a game with no trailer or UI. I received emails from people sending mods in for the game. For a brief period, I was living the indie dream. My silly little shit-code, gremlin of a game was in the public eye, and people were playing it.
One of the things that surprised me was that I had originally envisioned the game as a sort of discovery sandbox. Aside from the visual tutorial of placing three nodes in a row, the idea was that players would figure out how the game works by playing with it. But one of the strongest pieces of feedback that I got was that people didn’t understand how to play without clearer guidance, so I built in a roadmap. Quite far from my original vision.
In the first week, I had made over 50 patches. Now, those of you in the gaming industry will read this and understand that this means that I did a shoddy release with crappy code, skipped the QA phase, and had players fix the problems that I should have found myself during development.
But, you also must understand that I know how to market myself, so instead, consider the sheer commitment to the player experience that I showed as a solo dev. Imagine a scraggly bearded geek, hunched over in a spare bedroom, with a faster support time and community engagement than any AAA studio has ever seen. Yes, that’s right, I’m better than Rockstar, and you can quote me on that.
Two weeks later, the game is sitting on 3.3/5 stars across its reviews. It’s averaging around 30 players a day now, much less than at its exciting peak. But, despite what Parcel Game will tell you, infinite growth isn’t always the win.
I feel really proud of myself for doing this. This is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a small child, and, as much as Bug Game was the dream, sometimes you have to dream a little smaller. When you get lost, the way back to the big dream is through a smaller finished one.
✓ Project Bucket List was always about doing the things that I’d been putting off, but holy hell – this one was a big one. And, this doesn’t mean that I’m calling it a day. I’m now looking at funding for Bug Game, now that Parcel Game has proved something important: I can do it.
When I was three, my dad sat beside me and helped me find my way through a world I couldn’t yet read. Nearly three decades later, I built a tiny digital world of my own, ugly and addictive and held together with tape, and strangers chose to spend their time inside it.
You can play Parcel Game for free here. I hope that you enjoy it.