It’s the sparring partner you’ve always wanted, the secretary that handles your company organization, or the mentor you’ve always needed. Every SoloDev knows how challenging, exhausting, and versatile the problems of game development projects can be. You end up merging a whole bunch of jobs into one person and have to be at least somewhat competent in a hundred different areas.
For all the weaknesses AI has in topics where we already have deep expertise, it becomes incredibly helpful in areas where we’re not so strong, where we need confirmation, or where we need to run analyses.
Personally, I rediscovered my passion for coding projects through ChatGPT – even outside of the gaming space. Why? Because I love the conversations about state-of-the-art technologies, infrastructure, or even creating marketing assets. As a freelance developer and indie game dev, I juggle a ton of areas, and as always, there are some that I honestly just hate dealing with.
Perfect example: market analysis for new projects or social media marketing. This is exactly where I find AI to be the strongest. You can use it to draft small roadmaps, generate ideas for projects, and later verify them. On these meta and organizational levels, ChatGPT has become a completely new tool for me – one that has actually motivated me to do more, because I can offload the “low-level” work or the stuff I simply don’t enjoy.
It’s a huge relief to have something at your side that can confirm your idea is solid, or that a market isn’t already saturated. These kinds of statements do something to you. They give you the push to put energy and joy back into your work. Over the last few years, I had a ton of ideas and concepts, but I lacked that someone to say: “Hey, this is a cool idea, keep working on it.” Instead, I started seeing everything as not worth it anymore – and along with that, I lost the fun in daily programming.
That has now completely changed. I also work a lot with ChatGPT while coding. If you bring enough knowledge to recognize when it’s talking nonsense (which happens often), you save yourself tons of time digging through documentation or searching for examples. You get solid code snippets and interesting approaches for your work.
But: this only works if you actually know what you’re doing. Just copying things over without understanding them won’t get you anywhere. Very often, ChatGPT’s answers are missing exactly that specific expertise or the context you really need. Generic code only helps if you know how to turn it into something useful.
What I want to say is this: For me as a SoloDev, it’s become one of the most insane tools out there for boosting productivity.
Downsides
You often get solutions without having gone through the process yourself. That means you might miss important things along the way.
Handing over project management completely can be frustrating, because it’s easy to lose track.
My final advice: AI is a tool – and it should be treated as such. If you don’t understand something, it’s on you to learn it.
In my next post, I’ll write more in detail about my new project.
Es ist der Sparringspartner, den man sich immer gewünscht hat, die Sekretärin, die sich um deine Firmenorganisation kümmert, oder der Mentor, den du schon immer gebraucht hast. Jeder SoloDev weiß, wie herausfordernd, ausdauernd und vielseitig die Probleme von Gaming-Projekten sind. Man vereint eine Vielzahl von Jobs in einer Person und muss sich in hundert Bereichen zumindest halbwegs auskennen.
Bei all den Schwächen, die KI in Themen hat, in denen wir selbst tiefe Expertise besitzen, ist sie umso hilfreicher in Bereichen, in denen wir uns nicht so gut auskennen, Bestätigung brauchen oder Analysen durchführen müssen.
Ich persönlich habe meine Leidenschaft für Coding-Projekte durch ChatGPT wiedergefunden – auch außerhalb des Gaming-Bereichs. Warum? Weil ich die Konversationen über State-of-the-Art-Technologien, Infrastruktur oder die Erstellung von Marketing-Assets liebe. Als freiberuflicher Entwickler und Indie Game Dev habe ich unzählige Baustellen, und wie es eben so ist, gibt es Bereiche, die ich ehrlich gesagt einfach zum Kotzen finde.
Bestes Beispiel: Marktanalysen für neue Projekte oder Social-Media-Marketing. Genau hier finde ich KI am stärksten. Man kann sie nutzen, um kleine Roadmaps zu entwickeln, Ideen für Projekte zu sammeln und diese später zu verifizieren. Auf diesen Meta- und Organisationsebenen ist ChatGPT für mich ein völlig neues Tool, das mich tatsächlich motiviert hat, wieder mehr zu machen – weil ich „niedere“ Arbeiten oder Dinge, die mir weniger Spaß machen, einfach auslagern kann.
Es ist eine enorme Hilfe, jemanden an der Seite zu haben, der bestätigen kann, dass deine Idee gut ist oder dass ein Markt noch nicht besetzt ist. Solche Aussagen bewirken etwas. Sie motivieren, wieder Ehrgeiz und Freude in etwas zu investieren. Die letzten Jahre hatte ich viele Ideen und Ansätze, aber mir fehlte einfach jemand, der sagt: „Hey, das ist eine coole Idee, arbeite daran weiter.“ Stattdessen habe ich vieles als nicht mehr lohnend empfunden – und damit auch den Spaß am täglichen Programmieren verloren.
Das hat sich nun grundlegend geändert. Auch beim Coden arbeite ich mittlerweile viel mit ChatGPT zusammen. Wenn man genug Wissen mitbringt, um zu erkennen, wann es Mist erzählt (was oft passiert), spart man sich Unmengen an Dokumentationssuche oder Beispielrecherche. Man bekommt gute Code-Snippets und interessante Ansätze für die eigene Arbeit.
Aber: Das funktioniert nur, wenn ihr wisst, was ihr tut. Einfach Dinge rüberkopieren, ohne zu verstehen, was passiert, bringt euch nicht weiter. Oft fehlen in ChatGPTs Antworten genau das spezifische Fachwissen oder der Kontext, den ihr eigentlich braucht. Generischer Code hilft nur denjenigen, die auch damit umgehen können.
Was ich damit sagen möchte: Für mich als SoloDev ist es eines der krassesten Tools geworden, das mich produktiver macht.
Downsides
Man bekommt oft Lösungen, ohne selbst den Weg gegangen zu sein. Dadurch verpasst man vielleicht wichtige Dinge unterwegs.
Projektmanagement komplett aus der Hand zu geben, kann frustrierend sein, weil man den Überblick verliert.
Mein Rat zum Schluss: KI ist ein Werkzeug – und sollte auch so verwendet werden. Wenn ihr etwas nicht versteht, liegt es an euch, es zu lernen.
Im nächsten Post schreibe ich ausführlicher über mein neues Projekt.
It’s been a while since my last post. During this time, I’ve worked on several game prototypes, but nothing ever felt worth sharing publicly. A lot has changed in recent years — not just in the world, but also in my perspective on the industry, society, and creativity. Still, one thing remained constant: my passion for game development.
Rebuilding Momentum
Now feels like the right time to reactivate some of my old marketing channels and create new ones. I want to rebuild a consistent workflow — pursuing small but meaningful projects with enthusiasm, without burning out. My goal: finally build a game I can truly be proud of. One that lets me say, “I gave it everything I had.”
Timbertales & Streaming – A Learning Experience
Last year, I began streaming my work on a new version of Timbertales, porting it to Godot and recreating its core features. I made solid technical progress — but streaming every day while developing was overwhelming. Speaking English on stream while thinking deeply in code didn’t come naturally to me.
These days, I still stream regularly — but now I focus on gameplay streams in German, and that feels far more authentic and sustainable.
Why I’m Coming Back – Again
My heart has always belonged to indie game development. After nearly four years of freelancing in eCommerce, I find myself longing for something more intellectually and creatively fulfilling. That had always been the plan when I became self-employed — but somewhere along the way, the focus shifted entirely to financial survival.
Now, I want to realign with that original intention: to create complex, meaningful software that challenges me.
Uncertainty & Small Sparks of Inspiration
Truth be told, I’m still figuring things out. Everything feels difficult. I often find myself asking:
Where should I even start?
What do I truly want to make?
What’s the next right step?
But I’ve recently rediscovered my curiosity for Blender and 3D modeling — working through a few tutorials has helped me reconnect with creativity. It’s not a full plan yet, but it’s a spark.
What’s Next?
This post sat in my drafts for quite a while — and in the meantime, things have already started to move. I can now tease that I’m working on something new, and I’ll share more about it in my next blog post.
If you want to stay updated or simply be part of the journey, feel free tojoin my Discord — I’d love to connect.
Recently I found my inspiration and motivation deep in the cellar. Of course I never cancelled my game development completely, but with the current situation I had a lot of other thing to care about. As usual the biggest problem was the financials the last two years.
So let me just give you this advice to everyone who thinks about getting full time indie – Make sure to have financial freedom to do so for at least one year. With fear of financial ruin in your mind the creativity is completely killed and you will lose all your motivation and inspiration.
I am happy to be back and provide you some updates about my current project and achievements.
Simple water shader in Godot
For my current project I was playing around with some tiles and I created this water shader to have some kind of background for the tiles. I was pretty happy with the result. First of all I have to say that I copied most of it from here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MfcliFqjnE but the difference is in the camera.
For the original shader a perspective camera was used. I wanted to make the shader working with a orthogonal one, so I had to make some adjustments, since the depth buffer doesn’t work this way on an orthogonal camera. You can find my shader code here: https://github.com/ruffiely/windshader_godot/blob/master/water.shader
I hope you like it and you can use it for your project as well.
Get your Godot topic covered by me
Another thing I want to mention in this post is: I came up with a new idea for my Patreon page. You are now able to request a Godot specific topic which will be covered by me in a video tutorial by becoming a Patreon. With this change and focus on my Patreon page I would like to concentrate more on video tutorial and providing more value for the community by getting something in return.
Your advantage: You can get a very specific topic covered and explained in depth which maybe helps other on my channel as well.
Beside of that I started with a new prototype for a new game and achieved already some playable scenes I will report within the next post.
I am still working on games guys and I want to give you a little life sign with this post today. My last post is already half a year ago many things changed in that time, but some are still the same.
The Corona pandemic hit me quite hard. Yeah, I am working from home and normally I would not have any problem with it, but most of my business money was spent. So, I needed to work as a freelancer to earn some money. Unfortunately most of the companies I worked previously weren’t looking for any freelancer. In the end I had to live from social benefits and I still do.
Nevertheless in the mean time I got some motivation back and I came up with some new game ideas. Currently I am doing a lot of prototyping and testing these ideas. In the past with my first two games Timbertales and FlatFatCat I have made big mistakes in this stage of development. I always started with the game design document and afterwards I started with the development (production phase). After a while I noticed that these games weren’t as fun as I expected, but I invested already so much that I kept the development going.
Even now I often update the steam store page etc. without any luck
What was the biggest mistake in the past?
I skipped the pre-production completely. Instead of testing out the core gameplay and verifying if the gameplay is fun at all I started with the production of the game without defining the game enough. Today, I think that is why I couldn’t ever bring Timbertales to a quality I wanted to have. The gameplay lacked innovation and fun from the beginning. The technology I used was quite good and I had also well written code. The graphics are simple but supporting the game. Thats all fine and I am very proud I could even release some games with decent content.
I always tried to sell those games and I didn’t get the numbers I was looking for. The game isn’t fun, innovativ or good enough and I spent too much time caring about these games, because I already invested too much time into them. Today I have a very different opinion and it took me quite a while to see things clear. Of course I was emotional bound to these games and I wanted to have success.
Why is pre-production and prototyping so important?
There are several benefits from prototyping before you go into production. First of all you can verify if your game idea is actually fun. Ideas tend to be awesome in our minds and we always want to create them as quickly as possible, if you have a high claim on quality for example you will spend months of development before you can even test your first scene. This can become very dramatic if you realise that your game idea isn’t fun at all or don’t work as you expected. This is why you should prototype first and bring your game idea as soon as possible to a playable version.
Another problem I encountered with both my games was the scope of the games. In the end of production I started to add features because I thought the game wasn’t good enough. I missed the opportunity to define the scope of the game before I started with production. That was a big problem because it raised a lot of questions during the development. I had to think on the fly about solutions and I came up with a lot of features, which were never planned.
When I am talking about pre-production think about film makers most of their work is pre-production. Before they can go into production the story board needs to be completed. All actors needs to be casted and all location needs to be defined. Then they can start with actual production (recording) of the scenes. In game development this is quite similar before we go into the production (development) we should define our story, core gameplay, levels and scope of the game and this is done by prototyping some basic levels for evaluation.
Afterwards in production you can start to claim a high quality in assets or levels, because everything else was defined in pre-production and isn’t a thing to think about anymore. You now know what you have to do and this should be the goal of the pre-production phase. A long time game development was quite complex for me and this was because I did everything on the fly while production, but if you have a very good pre-production the production becomes very easy and you just have to finish your game 🙂
The downsides and throwbacks of pre-production and prototyping phase
You need to be very honest to yourself. If you start prototyping and you realise that your game idea doesn’t work – Drop it! It is very hard to drop projects. As you can see with Timbertales and FlatFatCat I am not able to this even after so much time I earned nothing from those games. As a developer you are emotional bound to your games and it is very hard to drop things, but the if you can do this it will save you a lot of time and money!
For example if I would have started Timbertales with a simple prototype I would have realised soon that there is something missing in the gameplay there is no fun or innovation. I would have spend a month or two in development and I would need to drop that work which would be hard, but it is so much better than developing the game for a year and earn nothing like I did.
Another downside of prototyping: You can’t plan this process. It is kind of creative work. Some days you don’t have the energy for that, but in prototype phase you need to be creative and test innovativ and fun ideas. In this stage of development you can’t just finish things you have to play around and explore. Also it is very hard to define when pre-production is really finished.
Will my next game be more successful than the other?
I really hope so! The approach overall feels much better. I spend a lot of time into testing and prototyping which really makes me feel like an indie game developer. I already know that my next game will offer so much more fun and the core gameplay loop is so much better.
Sometimes it is very hard if your ideas won’t work on the first day or some gameplay elements just don’t look good or feel good. It is also a problem that I always want to polish things a lot, but keep in mind if your gameplay is really fun then it will be fun with unpolished assets as well!
I hope I could give you a little insight today on my new approach to making games. If you interested in following the development progress make sure to subscribe to our newsletter on my website or join my Discord
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