98 views. 40 plays. 1 comment — and that one was mine.
That was the result of three months of work. Evenings, weekends, and a few sleepless nights. And the hardest part wasn't the numbers. It was the feedback that came with them: "Interesting, but I'm not sure what it is."
What I Actually Built
Sappy was an emotional survival game — at least, that's what I told myself it was. The player controlled a small jester-like character moving through an open world, collecting orbs, and surviving.
But Sappy wasn't just a jester. He had emotions. Real ones. When he was angry, his head turned red. Fear made him purple. Joy lit him up yellow. Sadness washed him in blue.
Every single one of those states had its own hand-drawn sprites. I drew everything in Procreate — 4 animations, 4 directions each, across 4 emotional variants. That's a lot of sprites for one character. And I wasn't done.
The environment had emotions too. Every tile, every tree, every background element existed in two versions: a Sad version and a Happy version. The world itself was supposed to breathe with Sappy's emotional state.
I wanted to give the game a story. But it was an open-world map with survival mechanics. How do you give a narrative to something deliberately open? And if I added a story, did the survival mechanics still make sense? The more I thought about it, the less I knew what Sappy actually was.
I kept building anyway.
If you're a developer navigating that strange intersection of code and creativity, I write a newsletter on Substack about exactly that — the solo dev journey, the mistakes, and what I'm figuring out along the way. You can find it at danielrusnok.substack.com.
The Feedback That Broke the Illusion
I shipped Sappy to itch.io. I reached out to gamedev communities and asked people to try it.
The numbers were brutal. But numbers I could have accepted. What I couldn't shake was what people actually said.
Nobody said the game was bad. They said they didn't know what it was.
"Interesting, but I don't understand the goal." "Cool character, but where's the onboarding?" "What kind of game is this supposed to be?"
These aren't the same as "this needs work." They're something worse. They mean the game had no identity — and no amount of polishing would fix that.
The Problem Wasn't the Work. It Was the Foundation.
I'd been asking the wrong question the whole time.
Instead of "How do I build this better?" I should have been asking "What is this, exactly?"
Was Sappy an emotional survival game for adults? Then why was there a cheerful jester collecting orbs? Was it a children's game? Then why the abstract open-world mechanic with no clear goal? Was it a narrative game? Then the entire structure — open world, survival loop — was fighting the story rather than carrying it.
I'd built hundreds of hand-drawn sprites. I'd coded the emotional state system. I'd designed a whole world with dual versions of every asset. And underneath all of it was a question I'd never answered: What is this game for? Who is it for?
Three months of evenings and sleepless nights — and I'd built something technically impressive that nobody, including me, could explain.
The Five-Minute Scene That Changed Everything
A few weeks after Sappy's launch, I wanted to play something that would actually move me. I asked ChatGPT to recommend a game — something emotionally driven, something I hadn't heard of.
It suggested Planet of Lana.
I didn't know it. I loaded it up.
Within five minutes, two sisters are screaming at each other. No tutorial. No exposition dump. Just two characters, a relationship, and immediate emotional stakes.
I paused the game and sat with that for a moment.
This. This is what I want to make.
Not survival loops. Not open worlds. A story you feel before you understand it. Two characters whose relationship is the mechanic.
Starting Over (But Not From Zero)
I didn't throw away Sappy. I finally understood what he was missing.
The emotional state system — the red anger, the purple fear, the yellow joy, the blue sadness — that was real. That was worth keeping. But Sappy needed a world that made those emotions matter. He needed someone to have those emotions with.
I started thinking about companionship. About what it means to navigate emotions not alone, but in relationship. I'd wanted to add a companion to Sappy from the beginning — I just hadn't known why. Now I did.
I thought about who those two characters could be. And I found them in my own life: the person I was before I became a father, and the small person who changed me. A solo dev dad and the little girl who taught him to feel things he'd spent years ignoring.
That's where Eli and Uri came from. You can follow the journey at echoeswithingames.com.
A side-scrolling 2D game. Two characters. One emotional journey. A story that only I can tell — because it's mine.
What Three Months of "Wasted" Work Actually Taught Me
I didn't waste those three months. I just didn't know what I was learning yet.
I learned that technical execution without creative clarity is a trap. You can draw hundreds of sprites and still not have a game. I learned that feedback saying "I don't know what this is" is the most important feedback you'll ever get — and the most painful to hear. And I learned that the question "What is this game, exactly?" has to be answered before anything else.
Sappy taught me what I wanted to make. Sometimes that's worth three months and a hundred sleepless hours.
If you're in the middle of a project that feels unclear — not broken, just undefined — stop building for a moment. Ask yourself the question I avoided for too long: What is this, exactly? And who is it for?
You might not like the answer. But you'll build something better because of it.
Are you a solo dev navigating the same questions? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
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