I cannot sit still. It’s something that’s always been a part of me, but I didn’t realise until 2024. That is when, at age 33, I finally got my official ADHD diagnosis.
The above makes sense in how I approach my work. I am dedicated, smart, diligent and obsessive. I need to be kept busy, I thrive on creativity, making things, check-listing, and encouraging others to make great things. So, despite some people’s preconceived notion of ADHD = BAD, in fact, my ADHD is what truly empowers me.
It does, however, get me quite down when everything that fuels me is no longer there. I try not to get angry at the state of the games industry, but it’s hard to do that when I continue to be let down by it, and like so many of my fellow indie devs, there are many things I wish I could say.
My discipline is production. I’ve worked as an Assistant Producer and Lead Producer, and in Irish language localisation. Here are the commercial games I’ve worked on: Eyes of Hellfire, Saltsea Chronicles, Among Us, VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, Axyz, Crowded.Followed, Familiar Findings, Terry’s Other Games, Lumo 2.
I am not afraid to try, fail, and try again. And believe me, that’s all happened.
So why solo games?
For one, it was time once again to bulk up my portfolio. While my track history of working in games was clear, I wanted to show that I was more than just one “thing”. I’m not just a Producer.
While I work very well in Production, writing and narrative are also my bread and butter. In fact, I originally applied for a writing internship with Die Gute Fabrik (Mutazione, Saltsea Chronicles) because that’s what I wanted to do. At the time, I didn’t get the role, but was invited back to work with them a few months later on Saltsea in Production.
My degree is in Irish and Journalism. I trained as a journalist, worked in newsrooms and published four books: Anseo (New Island Books), DIY Gaeilge 1 & 2, and Experience Ireland (Lonely Planet). My latest feature for CTRL: Essays on Video Games (Lilliput Press) is coming in April 2026. Can you tell that I like being kept busy?
So, with all that in mind, writing for games, game design and narrative design were always skills I wanted to hone.
Secondly, there was no one else but me to work on this. This was an opportunity to challenge myself, where I would guide the entire process from start to finish, with just me responsible for absolutely everything along the way (the background in Production definitely helped).
This reflection is a mass overview of seven games I made between November 2025 and March 2026. Seven are published, and there’s an eighth in prototype two, with playtesters. No GenAI was used in the making of my games, just the blood, sweat and shrimping posture of a body too used to leaning forward at her desk.
I am SPEED!
People say that I’m unbelievably fast at producing work. Well, yes and no. While it may look like I’m creating at a ferocious rate, I am not as fast a worker as people may think. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking myself down here. I want folks to understand that I simply had a lot more time because my days consisted of the following core loop:
- Search for jobs
- Apply for jobs
- Get rejected for jobs
- Work on games
Mingled with early mornings, long nights, food and cat pets, I had a lot of time to plan and to think. By the way, if you like what I do. Consider connecting with me on LinkedIn (just drop a note with the invite so I know who you are).
Choosing the engines (and tools)
All the engines and tools I used in making my games are free.
Because I’m not a programmer nor have any background in computer science, I was like a shiny blank slate. I was the definition of a blessing in disguise. I had no prior experience with coding apart from making a HTML page on David Attenborough back in 2009 (college assignments are weird), so every day was a learning day.
Firstly, I brainstormed general game ideas. I know what games I like, I know what mechanics I like, and I wanted to see what I could try. But also, I know that games do not magically pop out of thin air. My Gantt charts told me so.
Games take a bucketload of planning and execution, and the careful curation of “MVP” (“minimal viable product”, not “most valuable player”) tasks to “nice to have but not realistic to have right now” tasks.
Or you could just ignore that and make an unorganised, never-ending, slush pile of a list with no direction…
Please don’t.
The Seven Games
Chicken Fillet Rolls (Twine)
I made this game late in 2025. I was looking for work and needed an outlet – anything – to push my sadness (and frustration) away. Not the healthiest thing in the world to do, but desired in that moment.
Not being a programmer, Twine seemed like my most logical choice and it was freeeeeeee.
I could either go super basic, e.g. make a game with very simple choices A / B, even something more kinetic with the text always moving forward, or decide to push myself and see if I landed. I chose the latter.
Chicken Fillet Rolls, or affectionately CFR (I acronym most of my games – AITA?!), is a story-driven game about heading to an Irish deli and ordering a roll. How basic, but how damn wonderful as a starting point. CFRs are a staple in Irish delis; they’re the quintessential Irish lunch. I have fond memories of them and knew I wanted to bring them into a game.
Now you’re probably thinking: a deli-game, hrm, the text-based “Twine” engine doesn’t seem like a logical fit. This feels far more café-manger-esque. Give me more POW, PIZAZZ! MORE ACTION! MORE ROLL MAKING! I need VISUALS GODDAMNIT.
I respect that and there’s certainly a place for that, but that’s where my mind tends to work differently. The heart of the story was the story, not the action. It was about people, community, and theatre of the mind. Perhaps this was my TTRPG mentality shining through, but I didn’t want to show everything up front.
As of right now, CFR is by far my most popular game, probably because it resonates with a lot of Irish people and also because people say my writing in it is really good.
It’s written purely with Hiberno-English in mind, which adds to its charm.
For more in-depth thoughts, my Game Design Doc (GDD – another acronym, help!) is here. It’s not a traditional GDD in that I treated it as a live doc with reflections throughout. This was my first time working and learning about variables, and that was a challenge for me because of how my ADHD presents itself. I do not do arithmetic well; I do it slowly.
Thankfully, the Twine community are very strong on Discord, and it helps that my husband is a mathematician with incredible patience. He’s won awards for his teaching, and I’m very proud of him!
Inheritance (Ink)
Following CFR and its apparent success, I was still very much in writer mode. My goal here was to get to grips with more narrative tools. While I had a brief stint using INK when working on Saltsea Chronicles (I was the resident typo-fixer and reworked things to be written in British English), I didn’t have experience working with it from scratch.
At the same time, I was fiddling around with another narrative and dialogue tool, Yarn Spinner, and enjoying both.
While I got Yarn Spinner working with Unity, I wasn’t quite in the mood to create something with Unity just yet, so I opted to go with Ink, as I could export it quite quickly and host it on itch.io. I also own the physical version of the INK documentation book and highly recommend it.
What I played around with was something I had already created as a vignette for my D&D campaign. I’ve been the Dungeon Master of the same weekly campaign for over 7 years and naturally know my characters extremely well.
And so, using characters I’d already established and a story I already had in place, I tweaked it within Ink to fit all of the choices I slid into the story.
If you like queer stories, teenage angst and some light magic, then check it out.
FCK ICE (GameMaker)
I’d like to think this game is self-explanatory.
I wanted to make something scrappy, quick and impactful, much in the way that protests go. The game was made where the violence against innocent people by ICE in Minnesota was particularly horrific and more in the news than it had ever been.
It should be said that it’s still bloody awful. It still pains me to type this, knowing that their people in the US are still struggling under this terrifying state of oppression.
Made in GameMaker using the visual code instead of the written code. I followed a tutorial for an asteroids-type game and honestly, I don’t think I learned much apart from following steps. Not good for learning. GameMaker needs to be revisited when I’m in a better frame of mind. I edited the ice cubes in Krita (a free design/art tool).
I don’t have much else to say about it apart from that I made it while I was angry about ICE, and I still am. Some extra materials (also available via the game page):
- Seven Ways You Can Take Action for Immigrants
- Tell Congress: Stop ICE’s Deadly Detention Expansion & Mass Arrests
- Want to Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators.
- Volunteer Actions and Events
Another Day in Paradise (Bitsy)
I was tinkering around with Bitsy, a small engine made by Adam Le Doux. It uses bit-sprites, and I found myself drawn to how, on the surface, the engine looks simplistic, but actually, you can make well-rounded games with it.
I think it’s safe to say I made ADIP in a frenzied state of anger and sadness. It’s a game that absolutely stems from my frustration with the games industry.
My original sprites were presented as quite “happy” looking, but I knew that I didn’t want them to be that way. And so I developed the game with the intention of everything not being as it seemed like Doki Doki Literature Club, just not as hardcore, given the limitations of the engine. No anime girls here (yet…)
As it was my first time using Bitsy, I opted to go pure vanilla, but there are “hacks” available to make the engine less limiting.
This game definitely brought me closer to a lot of fellow game devs who’ve felt the pain of being whacked around by the games industry and, indeed, the pain of being creative when the spark is taken from you.
You can read my GDD here.
Top Potato (Scratch)
Hm. Potatoes.
Intrigued and weirdly energised by the idea of “limitation”, I decided to choose a kid-friendly engine for my next project. From what I know of Scratch, it’s an engine that is taught to students in the US. I, not being from the US, had no prior knowledge of it, but I loved the idea of stripping all the tools away to something a kid could make.
Scratch uses a visual code, with the code slotting into each other like a strange maths-based LEGO system.
The premise for Top Potato was basic, like SUPER BASIC. You are a potato. You eat smiley faces. You grow bigger. You become a Top Potato. WHOO HOO!
I drew the sprites and background, which were not my finest work but still fit into the childlike aesthetic I was going for and also read up on Anna Anthropy’s book on Scratch to kickstart this idea. I tweaked the code to suit my needs, and the absolutely, very serious game was born.
Scratch itself is very basic, with limitations like a 10MB limit per asset, 5mb .json file limit, and, in general, can only handle low-res graphics. There are convoluted workarounds for those things but after working with it, a bigger question is whether it’s worth it when other engines exist? Spoiler alert: it’s not.
My four nephews (all under 9) were fascinated that I could program a game and even beat the hard mode version of Top Potato, so while it isn’t my most glamorous game, I still count it as a win. They are all Top Potatoes.
It wasn’t for nothing, though, and I did learn from using GameMaker and Scratch that I don’t think I’m a massive fan of visual code, which is funny because I am a visual learner for most things.
Definitely not an engine you should use professionally, but a fun experiment nonetheless for scrappy games. What I found particularly interesting is the way that anyone can remix and use your code after it’s published. So you can jump into anyone’s creation and see exactly how it was made.
Game Jams
A game jam is when you create a game in a short period of time, often just in a sweaty weekend. I’d never partaken in any myself, just admired them from a distance and so knew I had to give it a lash.
From the Ground Up (Bitsy)
This is my submission to Mossflwr’s VTuber Tiny Game Jam 2026 with the theme ‘Grow’. I made it in seven days.
I decided to go back to the Bitsy engine because I wanted to go one step further and use Bitsy Hacks. I decided to use just one, Bitsy Muse, which allowed me to use custom music instead of the 8-bit vibes that I had used in ADIP.
The premise itself was quite simple: You begin as a sentient plant called Hyacinth who’s on the hunt for humans. Your plant friends are dying. You need to find Her. Who? You’ll find out.
Honestly, I think this is my best game.
It’s a complete, fully-rounded, well-thought-out narrative-driven game that fits the theme well. I was very taken by all of the lovely comments on my game page.
You can read my GDD here.
Check Mates (Ren’Py)
I had an absolute blast making this.
Visual novels (VNs) get a lot of flak from gamers, which always amuses me because the storytelling in VNs often surpasses that in other games. I’ve always adored interactive fiction, and when NaNoRenO game jam loomed, I was on it like a bonnet.
NaNoRenO is an online game jam where you make a visual novel from scratch. It usually runs from the start of March to the end of it and has been running every year since 2005! That’s hardcore jamming. There are no judges or prizes, but creating something is reward enough in my opinion.
Similar to how CFR came to be, Check Mates also challenged the norm. A chess-based game… with no ACTION and in a visual novel engine?! No pieces to poke and prod and move from here to there? How odd! How weird!
How challenging.
In 2025, I spent an obscene amount of time playing chess. It was how I kickstarted my mornings, what I watched on YouTube and what I played at night. Was I good at it? Nope. But for someone with ADHD, it gave me just the right amount of dopamine I needed to keep going back for me. Plus, it felt good for my brain, even with my unimpressive ELO rating. Please don’t ask.
How it came to be the basis for my visual novel was quite simple. I was browsing background assets for VNs to see what was available, and I spotted a black and white tiled floor. Ah ha. Checkmate.
I chose to use Ren’Py, a popular VN engine that has published some of my favourite games like Slay the Princess, Videoverse and Doki Doki Literature Club. Combined with VS Code, this felt nittier and grittier than the other engines I had been building in.
Ren’Py is based on Python, and while new to me, it used coding concepts that I had become familiar with through the course of making solo games. Basically, if you understand Python, it won’t be hard to understand Ren’Py. Variables, if statements, and elifs were all less daunting because of the work I’d put in previously. It was like all the building blocks were coming together. I felt so empowered.
This was also the perfect time to work on more digital art. While I’ve painted on canvas for many years, digital was still slightly foreign to me. I’ve created a decent amount of pieces before, but never had to bulk-create assets. Exciting (but slow).
Since NaNoRenO is a month-long jam, on the surface, it seemed like a good chunk of time to work on making assets, but given that I was also trying to learn Python and flesh out an actual game on my own, time flew.
But I was smart about it. No way was my game going to be beyond an hour of gameplay, no way I was going to opt for a fully voice-acted game and no way I was going to waste time drawing backgrounds when my sprites were the emotional core.
So I prioritised like there was no tomorrow and tapped into the network I had. One of my playtesters and an excellent game designer herself, Charlene Putney, offered to do some extra voice acting for me and another voice actor, Luck Ryder, offered their services to folks partaking in the jam. I used background asset packs for anything I didn’t get time for, as well as SFX and voices through freesound under CC0, CC3.0 and CC4.0 licences.
A massive special thanks to fellow game dev Naoimh Murchan, who was so generous with her time to troubleshoot Ren’Py issues with me.
Still in the Works
The Eighth Game (the Card Game)
While working on both From the Ground Up and Check Mates, I worked on an analogue game.
This idea was fuelled by an exercise in Slay the Dragon! Writing Great Video Games, where you look at something that already resonates with you, e.g. a classic movie, and try to translate it into some sort of board game. Normally, I hate when books give me an exercise – how dare they give me homework – but this concept quickly came to fruition.
I took one of my favourite movies and broke it down into blocks and events. From there, I played ideas using a standard deck of cards to create ideal scenarios and gameplay that works even for a non-mathematically inclined brain such as mine.
I slid my original breakdown aside and armed with the promise of a core loop, set to work on making it more fun. It’s now in its third iteration, and I’m very much looking forward to jumping back into it.
I’m very grateful for playtesters who’ve given me feedback on it so far. It’s coming.
Getting feedback
Feedback is fundamental.
I understand that it can be daunting to put your work out there, but you will not improve if you don’t suck it up. What’s worse than getting bad feedback? No feedback. And I’m not talking about some random reviewer on Steam, I’m talking about when you’re iterating and prototyping. Even if it’s negative, at least whoever gave it to you bothered to review your work.
That isn’t to say that you should take it to heart (you shouldn’t), but trust it will make you a stronger and better game dev. Reflect, analyse, but don’t abandon your core vision because of one bit of feedback. Make sure you understand what exactly the issue is.
If getting feedback still scares you, I recommend reading Thanks for the Feedback.
General tips for building your game portfolio
- Don’t be like, “I’m going to make an MMO for my first game”, that’s just absolutely outrageous behaviour, and it’s certainly not going to take a short amount of time.
- There’s no real point in investing lots of money in tools straightaway when there are so many free ones available. Especially if you’re like me and are unemployed.
- Work with others. While all of my games were ultimately pulled together by me, that didn’t mean I didn’t get help. Tap into your network, see if there are ways to collaborate on certain things. Ask for advice on your code. Admit when you’re struggling.
- It’s totally ok to use free assets! There are so many asset packs out there where all you need to do is credit the creator, which you 100% should. However, you have to be extra mindful because we’re in this annoying situation where AI slop is everywhere. Bleugh. So just be careful. Sadly, it’s getting harder to spot them.
- Speaking of GenAI, using that to create your code will teach you nothing. Unless your goal is to become a copy-paste machine, then please go right ahead. But I, for one, get pure joy out of figuring out something that I previously thought unreachable. There’s something precious about using your brain to work things out. I get to feel smart. GenAI strips that joy away from you. Why would you want to give up something that’s yours?
- As mentioned, but I’ll do it again, get feedback. You should crave it. You should want to hook it to your veins.
- Back up your work. BACK IT UP. BACK IT UP. BACK IT UP.
Best engine?
I’m going to rank the engines for the likelihood I’ll use them again and how they contributed to my skillset. So bear in mind that I predominantly want to focus on story-rich games:
| Ren’Py | Yes, kick-started my Python journey, overall not complicated, strong community. |
| Twine | Yes, helped me understand variables very quickly, strong community |
| Bitsy | Yes, but not for commercial games. Solid for game jams. Limitations make it kind of irritating at times. |
| GameMaker | Probably I need more time to make things, and next time I don’t want to use the Visual Coder. |
| Scratch | Nooooooooooo. Doesn’t suit commercial games. Too limiting. |
Extra note: I have worked in Unity; I just haven’t made any solo games in it. I’m not sure if I want to. I also own RPG Maker MX and RPG Maker VX Ace, but haven’t touched them yet either. I did use Ink, but that is not an engine! However, it is an excellent tool and is used in many dev projects, so no doubt I’ll be using that again.
The future
Oh, the games industry… How does one even look towards the future in an industry so fraught with controversy and not enough jobs…
I’m going back to education.
Some say this is a ludicrous idea (no seriously, I’ve been told), but I care not for their opinion in this matter. I’m doing this for me.
I begin a diploma in narrative design in May, which runs until August, and then I begin my part-time Master’s in Indie Game Development in September. In between that, yes, I am and still am hunting for work, be it full-time, part-time, short-term, long-term, etc.
Let me stress too that it’s ok not to be ok, it’s ok to feel upset, angry, despair, frustration, especially if you’re working in this industry. It’s ok to feel happiness too, even when the world around you appears to be falling apart.
I know that can sound incredibly basic, but it’s the simplest things we often forget. I’ve felt not “ok” over the years at various points for many reasons. This is not something to be embarrassed about, shamed for or excluded for.
I have excellent references and a pretty rounded skillset suited for many teams, and hey, look, I’ve made many solo games.
What engine next?
I’m waiting for Godot.