Why I Started Making Games (And Why You Might Want To)

For most of my career as a builder, “making a game” sat in the same mental folder as “learn to play guitar” and “finally read that book I’ve owned for four years.” Aspirational. Perpetually on the list. Never quite happening.

I’d built web apps, browser extensions, automation tools — useful stuff, practical stuff, stuff that solves real problems. Games felt like a completely different world. A world for people with art degrees and Unity certifications and an inexhaustible tolerance for debugging physics engines. Not for me, I told myself. I’m a practical guy.

Reader, I made a game. And I have thoughts.

The Pull Was Always There, I Just Kept Ignoring It

Here’s the embarrassing truth: games were literally the reason I got into programming in the first place. As a kid I was obsessed with them — not just playing them, but dissecting them. Why did this one feel amazing and that one feel like a chore? What makes a game loop satisfying? How do you make a player feel clever without making them feel lost?

Those questions lived rent-free in my head for years. But at some point “practical Joe” took over and decided that building useful tools was the move, and game dev could wait for retirement or whatever. So every time a game idea popped up, I nodded politely and filed it under “someday.”

Someday eventually got tired of waiting.

Turns Out, Games Are the Hardest Product Challenge

Here’s what actually surprised me when I started: making a game is a genuinely hard product problem. Like, harder than most web app work I’ve done. And I mean that as a compliment to the medium, not a complaint.

With a web app, your user has a job to do. They want to track something, send something, manage something. Success is measurable — did they do the thing? Did it work? You can instrument all of this and make data-driven decisions like a responsible adult.

Games don’t have a job. They have vibes. Your user is there to have fun, which turns out to be one of the most slippery, subjective, impossible-to-spec things you can try to design for. There’s no acceptance criteria for fun. “User must experience joy” doesn’t fit neatly into a Jira ticket (I’ve tried). You just have to build something, play it, hand it to someone else, watch their face while they play it, and adjust. Over and over until it’s good.

It made me a better product thinker. There, I said it.

What I Didn’t Expect (The Good Stuff)

I didn’t expect to love the constraints. Game dev forces you to answer the uncomfortable questions early — what is the player actually doing every 30 seconds? Why do they care? What makes them want to keep going? Ignore those questions and you end up with something technically functional that nobody wants to play for more than five minutes. I know this because I built exactly that thing on my first try. It was a learning experience!

I also didn’t expect how much of my existing background would carry over. Performance thinking, UX instincts, the habit of shipping early and iterating — all of it translated directly. The tools are different. The mindset really isn’t.

What genuinely caught me off guard was how personal making a game feels. A useful app is functional. A game is kind of a little window into how you see the world — what you find fun, what you think is funny, what you want someone to feel. That’s a weirdly vulnerable thing to put out there. I didn’t fully expect that. I’m still processing it, honestly.

Should You Make a Game?

If the thought has ever crossed your mind — even once, even briefly — I’d say yes. Not because it’s easy, and not because it’ll definitely make you rich (the indie game market will humble you very quickly on that front). But because it’s one of the most interesting creative challenges I’ve taken on, and it’s made me a better builder across the board.

Start tiny. Build something you’d actually want to play. Don’t wait until you’ve learned every tool or taken every course. Ship it. Let people play it. Cringe a little. Improve it. You know the drill.

The Bottom Line

I put off making games for years because it felt like it wasn’t for me. Turns out it was for me all along — I just needed to stop being so sensible about it.

If you’ve got something sitting in your “someday” folder, maybe give it a look. Someday is allowed to be today.

What’s your someday project? Let me know on X/Twitter.