May 18, 2025 · Projects

FusionForge - Building a Video Game (Part 0)

TL:DR - Traded my backpack for a compiler and made a “pre-private mini-pre alpha” of a game called FusionForge. Link somewhere below if you're feeling brave.

Alright! Time for something a bit different (and maybe slightly more productive?) from the travel blogs. I’ve been working on and off during my travels, and since coming back from Asia, on coding a video game. It's basically my way of trying to learn the ropes of game development, pixel art, VFX, and design, things I never learned during my very expensive education.

Knowing my tendency to want to add all the things (hello, scope creep!), I forced myself to start with an MVP document for this game, which clearly listed the must-haves for the initial version of FusionForge. The gist is it's an incremental / idler game: you're playing around with elemental fusion in a reactor, trying to make in-game money, and then using that cash to upgrade your whole setup.

This is going to be a short series, broken down like this:

  1. Part 1: Incremental / Idler Games: What they are, what they mean to me, and why I picked this for a first game.
  2. Part 2: The FusionForge Project & MVP: What this thing actually is and what my "MVP" criteria were.
  3. Part 3: What's Next for FusionForge: Major design goals for the next big update, and when I’ll kid myself into thinking it's "finished."

Here’s a few links if you wanna take a look at the code / game!