About

AwfulGames is one person: me, at a desk, in Godot, for longer than I would like to admit. I build systems-heavy games — colonies that schedule themselves, economies that have to balance without me, simulations that must run the same way twice — because those are the ones I want to take apart. The devlog is where I take them apart in public, including the weeks that go badly.

The name is a leftover from a much younger project that was, genuinely, awful. I kept it because it points expectations in the right direction: nothing here is going to be pretty first. What I am aiming for is small scope, honest writing about the work, and games that hold up when you look closely at the simulation underneath. If you want to be told a game is great, there are better sites for that.

How the games get made

Every game starts as a throwaway prototype. One week, one system, no menus and no art: if the loop is not interesting with grey rectangles it will not become interesting later. Most prototypes end there, and I would rather delete a week of work than carry a bad idea for a year.

What survives gets its simulation built before anything else. Fixed timestep, seeded randomness, and a way to replay a save and get exactly the same result, because a system you cannot reproduce is a system you cannot debug. Art, sound and interface come after the simulation holds up, and only in the amount the loop needs.

Then the long part: one system at a time, each with a scene that runs headless, so a change that breaks prices or pathfinding fails before I see it. Scope is the constraint that makes one person enough. If a feature needs a team, it is the wrong feature for this studio.

I write the devlog while this happens, not after it. The posts about what broke are more useful than the posts about what shipped, and writing them down is how I find out that I did not actually understand the thing I had just fixed.

What I am working on

Galaxy Trader (working title) is the current project: a trading game where routes, prices and factions keep running while the player is elsewhere. It is in development, and the devlog is where its progress and its problems appear first.