Halfway through February, I showed someone the game I'd been building. Their feedback was 'Okay, but where is the actual game?' So I gave myself three weeks to answer that question.

If you're already familiar with me and my journey, feel free to skip down to the Quick Recap. But if you're new here - I'm Zack. I spent seven years in corporate project management before leaving to build things I actually care about. After some detours, I landed on game development and discovered something: I could put in the same long hours I always had, but instead of feeling crushed at the end of the week, I'd come out the other side excited to keep going. That was enough of an answer for me. Now I'm a full-time indie dev, building prototypes and searching for a game that's fun enough to ship. This newsletter is a monthly look at what I'm building, what I'm learning, and where things are headed. If you want the longer backstory, the January post covers how I got here.

Right now, the project consuming most of my attention is something I'm calling the Dungeon Builder Game (DBG) - an always-evolving dungeon crawler powered by player-created content. Players build and publish individual rooms, and the game stitches them together into escalating runs that are different every time. Think Mario Maker meets an extraction roguelike. It's the current frontrunner, but the whole point of this phase is rapid prototyping: build fast, test with real people, and figure out if something has legs before committing to it. If DBG doesn't survive contact with players, we move on to the next idea. That's the deal.

With that - let's get into it.

February was about building momentum and getting to full speed. Last time I wrote one of these, I'd been ramping back up after losing over two weeks to illness - I don't think I've ever been that sick before - and the game was really just a collection of semi-connected systems that hadn't really been tested together.

The core challenge was turning a proof of concept into something that actually feels like a game. Individually, most of the systems existed: room chaining, enemy spawning, loot drops, combat. But the gaps between them were where all the jank lived, and a systems test is a very different thing from something you hand to someone and say "play this."

I broke the remaining work into priorities: P0s (non-negotiable for the playtest), P1s (things I wanted), and P2s (nice-to-haves). Two weeks into the sprint, all 22 P0 tasks are cleared, with a number of P1s as well. Here are some of the bigger efforts:

Rebuilt how the dungeon is constructed. The system responsible for loading rooms, connecting them together, cleaning up behind the player, and transitioning between spaces was originally being held together with duct tape. I rebuilt it with a proper loading pipeline and room queue so the game can stitch rooms together seamlessly as the player moves deeper. Every other system (enemies, loot, objectives) immediately worked better because of it.

Difficulty and progression systems came online. This was one of the most impactful efforts of the month. Every room now carries a difficulty score, calculated automatically after it's built. When the dungeon selects rooms, it picks based on how deep you are. Enemies scale with depth - (more health, more damage) and loot scales up alongside them. The game's five-room cycles create a rhythm: you feel strong at the start, things get increasingly challenging with each room, and then you hit the break room where an upgrade makes you feel powerful again before the next cycle pushes even harder. All of this is nicely tied together with a system that allows me to tune everything with a few dials, something I know will be useful later when balancing the game.

Communicating the game to the player. A lot of this sprint was about making sure the player actually knows what's happening. Room objectives now display on screen so you know what you need to do to progress. Health and inventory are visible. Interaction prompts tell you when you can pick something up or open something. Enemies cast spells with visual feedback. None of these existed two weeks ago - and without them, the game was basically unreadable to anyone who wasn't reading console messages.

Combat got cleaned up. Weapons were broken, damage wasn't connecting properly, knockback felt off. I spent time fixing the core feel of melee and ranged attacks, then layered in status effects - things like burn, slow, and poison. These each have a chance to be added onto weapons and actually impact how enemies respond. This is the kind of work that doesn't look flashy, but it's the difference between combat feeling like you're swinging a pool noodle versus something with actual weight behind it.

Debug tools for faster iteration. One thing I invested time in was building some 'dev tools' - things that let me see enemy stats, weapon data, difficulty scaling numbers, and progression info all in real time while I'm playtesting. These aren't for the player, but they've made it dramatically faster to spot problems and tune systems without constantly digging through code. It's the kind of behind-the-scenes work that pays for itself ten times over - and it'll be just as valuable later when it's time to start balancing.

Two weeks in, all P0s are cleared and I've moved into P1s and P2s - room variety, atmosphere and lighting, combat feel improvements, and more room variants to give the playtest enough content to feel like a real dungeon run.

One of the goals I set for the year was to stop hiding and start sharing work publicly. I originally intended on releasing my first shortform content earlier this week, but decided to push it past the playtest after reading up on some strategy. Platforms push content that sparks conversation, which means it needs active engagement from me. With all the work thats left to do before the playtest, I think launching publicly is going to demand more real time and attention than I have to spare this week. However, I'm also intimately familiar with delaying something uncomfortable with an endless stream of excuses - so the launch date needs to stay firm.

In the meantime, I've been recording daily videos - short-form content covering the previous day's work in about 60 seconds. The goal was to see if it was even possible to make daily videos without eating into development time. Turns out it is. I started slow, testing the format with friends, getting comfortable with the sound of my own voice, and gradually getting faster with each one. Over the past few weeks, I've built out a small pipeline to support the process: tools for capturing and labeling footage while I'm coding, automated subtitle generation, video and audio templates so I can jump straight into editing, and a system that summarizes my recent work to feed into the next morning's script. The full workflow (ideation through posting) is now under 30 minutes.

I've also been studying how other indie devs structure their content and what kind of response different approaches get. The plan is to build Zack Coleman as the personal brand, with Coleman Games (a harken back to an old LLC of mine) as the studio name underneath. The daily devlogs won't just be about DBG - they'll follow whatever I'm working on, including days off and the broader journey of trying to find and ship a game.

The playtest is March 8th. A group of close friends and peers will sit down and play through the full cycle loop - five rooms, break room, decide whether to push deeper or extract. First time anyone will experience the game as an actual game rather than a systems test.

The goal between now and then? Close out everything. All remaining tasks - P1s, P2s, all of it. Ambitious, yes... But there's no better motivator than putting your idea on the chopping block.

After the playtest, the questions become: Is this fun? Does the loop work? Is this the project worth committing the next few months to? For what it's worth, I'm genuinely confident about this one. The idea has shifted and changed shape since the original inception, but every iteration has moved it closer to something that feels both fun and realistically shippable. If it is, the target is shipping by May. If it isn't, that's valuable information too, and the rapid prototyping continues.

Either way, I'll be writing about it here.

That's February. A massively productive month, and somehow just the warm-up. Thanks for reading!

And if you're new here, welcome! See you in April.

-Zack