My First Project: Squishy Friends

In 2014, shortly before getting my first professional job in the gaming industry, I decided to challenge myself by creating a game entirely on my own. Until then, most of my experience had come from modding existing games, experimenting with level design, and working with communities of people who shared the same passion. I had learned quite a lot along the way, but building something from scratch was a different challenge. I wanted to understand what it actually took to turn an idea into a playable game, from the initial concept to the final release.

The project became Squishy Friends, a small 2D game featuring five colorful sea creatures. My original plan was to finish everything in two weeks. It sounded reasonable at the time, especially since I wanted to keep the game relatively simple. In reality, it took me 30 days to complete. Looking back, that difference between my initial estimate and the actual development time was probably one of the first practical lessons I learned about planning, scope, and the tendency to underestimate how much work even a small project can require.

What made the experience particularly interesting was that I had decided to do almost everything myself. I wasn't an experienced programmer, I didn't know how to draw, and I had never taken a game through the entire development and publishing process. I knew I would have to learn a lot along the way, but that was precisely the point of the exercise.

Learning to Build a Game

One of the first decisions I had to make was which technology to use. I chose Unity, which meant learning the engine itself and figuring out how to implement the gameplay through programming. At the time, I considered Java and C#, eventually choosing C# because it was better suited to what I wanted to accomplish in Unity.

Programming was only one part of the challenge. I also had to understand how to create and manage animations for a 2D game, design the interface, produce the graphical assets, find suitable music and sound effects, and make sure all these elements worked together. There were plenty of tutorials and resources available, but I quickly discovered that knowing where to find information was very different from knowing how to apply it to a specific problem.

Much of the development process involved experimenting, making mistakes, and gradually figuring things out. Sometimes a feature that seemed straightforward would take hours to implement, while something I expected to be difficult turned out to be relatively simple. It was frustrating at times, but I genuinely enjoyed the process because every solved problem brought me closer to having an actual game.

From an Idea to a Playable Game

I started by putting the concept on paper and defining what I wanted the game to be. I thought about the number of levels, the characters, the main gameplay mechanics, and how the player would interact with everything. I also considered whether the game should be free or paid and what kind of social features I could integrate. Facebook was particularly relevant at the time, so I decided to explore how its functionality could become part of the experience.

Once I had a basic game design document, I started working on the visual elements, including the game's icon and characters. This was an interesting challenge because I had absolutely no drawing skills. :)) Rather than trying to draw everything traditionally, I built the artwork using simple geometric shapes, combining and adjusting them until I got something resembling what I had imagined. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated technique, but it allowed me to create the artwork myself and give the game a visual identity of its own.

Years later, while working on Don't Be Squared at SuperHippo, I remember showing these characters to Gabriel Serban, one of the artists I worked with. He kept telling me how terrible they looked, while somehow congratulating me for making them in the first place. :)) And to be fair, he wasn't wrong. I wasn't much of an artist, but I had managed to create all the artwork myself, and that was good enough for me at the time.

Initially, I had planned to create four characters and four levels, but as the project evolved, I decided that five characters would work better with the gameplay I had in mind. It was a small change, but it also showed me how easily a project can grow beyond its original scope. Every new idea sounds simple until you start considering all the additional work it introduces.

After creating the characters, backgrounds, and other graphical elements, I moved on to the audio. I used music from Incompetech because composing original tracks would have required skills and time I simply didn't have. I focused instead on choosing music that matched the atmosphere I wanted to create, while also working on the sound effects and the animations that would make the game feel more alive.

With the visual and audio elements prepared, I started implementing the gameplay mechanics in Unity using C#. This was probably the most demanding part of the project, as I had to bring together everything I had created and make it behave consistently. Learning to program while simultaneously building the game meant that progress wasn't always straightforward. I spent a considerable amount of time experimenting, debugging, and trying to understand why certain things weren't behaving the way I expected.

What I found particularly interesting was how quickly even simple mechanics could become complicated once different systems started interacting. Something that worked perfectly on its own could behave very differently when connected to the rest of the game. It was one of my earliest experiences with the importance of understanding dependencies rather than treating every feature as an isolated piece of functionality.

Once the core mechanics were working, I connected the levels, refined the main menu, and integrated the Facebook functionality I had planned earlier. The final stages involved publishing the game on Facebook, adapting it to work on Android devices, testing it, and eventually releasing it on Google Play. Seeing the game running outside the development environment was a particularly satisfying moment. What had started as a personal experiment had become something people could actually download and play.

The entire process took 30 days, twice as long as I had initially planned. Considering how much I had to learn, that probably shouldn't have surprised me. :))

What stayed with me, however, wasn't the missed deadline. It was the realization that I had managed to take an idea through every major stage of development and turn it into a finished product. I had made plenty of mistakes, and there were many things I would have approached differently with more experience, but I had also learned something that no amount of reading could have taught me quite as effectively: building something is the best way to discover how much you still don't know.

More importantly, Squishy Friends was the first game I had ever created entirely on my own, and it gave me the confidence that I could actually make games.

Game Trailer:

Meet the Squishy Friends

Beyond the technical challenges, I also wanted the game to have a bit of personality. That's how the Squishy Friends came to life: five fictional sea creatures who enjoy exploring the oceans, discovering new places, and competing with one another. Despite their competitive nature, they're good friends, and their adventures are meant to be playful rather than serious.

Each character had its own appearance and a little story behind it. Since I had created all the artwork myself using geometric shapes, giving them different personalities was also a way to make the most of my limited artistic abilities. I couldn't draw particularly well, but I could still make them recognizable and, hopefully, a little entertaining. :))

Cal Amarris, is an adventurous orange squid who loves exploring the largest oceans and swimming incredible distances without stopping for a break. He's always looking for somewhere new to go, and some of his friends believe he's the fastest swimmer of the entire group. Whether that's actually true is another matter, but Cal certainly likes to think so.

Otto Puzz, is a brownish octopus with a particular fascination for shiny objects and mysterious things hidden beneath the sea. She enjoys searching the ocean floor for little treasures and spending time with her friends from the Fish Club. Compared to some of the others, Otto prefers taking her time and discovering what interesting things might be hiding in places everyone else has overlooked.

Jel Ly, is a cheerful purple jellyfish who prefers the warm waters of the tropics. She's particularly interested in looking her best and can spend an impressive amount of time admiring herself before heading out for a swim. She's convinced that she's the prettiest member of the group, although I'm not sure the others would necessarily agree. :))

Bam, is a determined clam who enjoys exploring volcanic landscapes and other places that most sea creatures would probably avoid. He's always trying to prove how strong and adventurous he is, and eventually decided that Hawaii was the perfect place to call home. For Bam, a good adventure usually involves going somewhere difficult and finding a way to overcome whatever obstacles appear along the way.

Squishy Joe, is a happy, energetic starfish who loves exploring the ocean and discovering forgotten places. He's particularly fascinated by shipwrecks and lost cities, and he never misses an opportunity to investigate something mysterious. With his bright yellow appearance and enthusiasm for adventure, he's probably the most optimistic member of the group.

Looking Back

Looking at Squishy Friends today, I can easily recognize its limitations. The artwork is simple, the gameplay reflects my lack of experience at the time, and some of the decisions I made would probably be very different if I were building the same game now. But I wouldn't change the experience itself.

Before this project, I had spent years exploring how games worked through modding and level design. Squishy Friends was the first time I had to take responsibility for every part of the development process, from defining the initial idea to making sure the finished game could actually reach players. It forced me to think beyond individual features and understand how design, technology, art, audio, testing, and publishing all depend on one another.

It also taught me something about the difference between having an idea and turning that idea into a finished product. Ideas are relatively easy to come up with, but every decision introduces constraints, dependencies, and trade-offs. Even a small game requires you to constantly balance what you want to achieve against what you can realistically deliver with the time, knowledge, and resources available.

At the time, I was mainly interested in proving to myself that I could build a game. I didn't realize how relevant some of those lessons would become later in my career, first as a professional Game Designer, then in Game Economy Design, and eventually in Product Management. The technologies and responsibilities changed considerably over the years, but the underlying challenge remained surprisingly similar: understanding what you're trying to build, figuring out how the different pieces fit together, and making decisions that move the product forward.

Squishy Friends wasn't an ambitious commercial project, and it certainly wasn't a masterpiece. It was simply my first complete game, built out of curiosity, determination, and a willingness to learn things I had never done before.

And sometimes, that's all you need to get started.