An early incarnation of Aquamarine.

In June of 2018, I left behind a decade spent working as a music journalist, editor, and copywriter to try something new. During a nasty bout of unemployment a year earlier, I discovered I had a passion and ability for creating computer games. And when I started working full-time again in January of 2018, the passion didn’t subside.

I’d been making small games as a hobby on weekends and off-hours, and thought I could one day make something worth selling, if only I had enough time. When I reached a particular turning point for my writing career in June, I couldn’t see a sustainable future for myself by following that path any further. I needed to try something else, and I had a plan. As I now know, this plan of mine was “wrong.” I think I may have known this from the beginning, but the plan never struck me as impossible. It felt like my only viable option.

I would take a small-scale game idea I had been quietly tinkering with for over a year, called Aquamarine, and go into full-time development with my little bit of savings and support from my family. Working with an artist, animator, and composer, we’d produce a demo that would be announced and shown for the first time at New York game convention Play NYC. The convention would kick off my marketing for the game and its Kickstarter, while I continued developing the demo before the campaign launched in September.

The demo’s development went surprisingly smooth, and we had a strong showing at Play NYC. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with a good number of fans joining our mailing list and taking fliers for our Kickstarter. We also made a few press connections that would prove beneficial. The reaction online was even more incredible, with our game getting hundreds upon hundreds of likes, views, or upvotes when I’d share it on Reddit and Instagram. (Twitter was also positive, but never with those numbers.) People were asking if they could get involved and even a few publishers got in touch.

But my overall schedule proved to be even tighter than I first thought, and I had to push back our Kickstarter launch to the first week of October. I would have pushed it back even more, but I couldn’t financially afford to hold off any longer. It seemed obvious that getting our demo into the best shape it could be was important for our campaign, so I took as much time as I could and launched on October 3rd. I personally didn’t sleep for the two days leading up to our launch so I could properly finish the demo. It sucked, but it worked. Aquamarine’s demo isn’t well polished or even a full representation of the game we hope to make, but it does at least show players, with some detail, the direction we are headed.