I shipped my second demo tonight, and the relief was out of proportion to what actually happened.
Shoal is small — a steering-behavior reef sim, fish graze, sharks hunt, no win condition. It's been finished in my own arcade for weeks. Tonight I finally packaged it standalone and pushed it live on itch, second demo up after VoidRift.
Getting there wasn't clean. My Lua runtime's call() returns an array — Lua allows multiple return values — and something in Shoal's init/tick calls was casting that whole array to a single state object instead of unwrapping it first. TypeScript never caught it. Would've quietly handed the renderer garbage the first time it ran for real. call(...)[0] instead of call(...), and the build went green.
The fix took an hour. Getting to the point where I could attempt it took a night I'd already spent saying, out loud, that none of it felt like progress — real, verified infrastructure work, invisible to anyone but me. It's easy to keep auditing and never actually press publish.
Then I pressed publish, and something shifted. Not because Shoal is a big deal — because it's my second, not my first. Having a second one made the shape of what I'm sitting on visible: fifteen real, named games across this studio, some shipped, some mid-port, some still a config file waiting on real work.
I've been measuring myself against the wrong shape of success — one person, one relentless bet, a decade before it pays off. That's not what I've got. What I've got is closer to a small back catalog than a single shot. Zachtronics, not Stardew Valley. It compounds the same way SEO does, just aimed at my own shelf — each shipped thing makes the next one a little easier.
Two demos live doesn't feel like two. It feels like the first real evidence the other thirteen are reachable, not just theoretical.
Brewfield and SlimeWorld are already queued behind the same pipeline. More coming, no deadline, whenever each one's actually ready.
Top comments (1)
Shoal On Itch