Taking Control. Announcing Shard Cycle
When I played professional football, we just played. You put in the raw effort on the pitch and lived with the results.
When my sports career ended, I pivoted to software. I spent three years building web applications, winning a few corporate football tournaments on the side. That web experience was my foot in the door to game engineering. I spent the next eight years learning exactly how games are built and shipped professionally.
Recently, the game industry has become highly unstable. Massive layoffs and studio closures are the norm. Instead of navigating that chaos, I decided to take control. I am combining my 11 years of engineering experience to go solo and build my own game: Shard Cycle.
What is Shard Cycle?
Shard Cycle is a casual incremental game built around a tight "one more run" loop. Smash your way through grids of gorgeous crystals to harvest Plasma and Unicoins, spend the take on upgrades, then descend through deeper Layers where the crystals hit harder but pay out more.
Equip permanent Attachments from the Trader, grab temporary Modifications that drop mid-session, and prestige to unlock devastating Abilities: the chain lightning Arc Kracker and the roaming Shard Tornado.
My goal is to build a polished, mechanically tight experience using the engineering pipelines I've mastered over my career. I am not relying on gut feeling; I am building a game driven by solid architecture and data.
Over the next few devlogs, I will share the development process, the systems behind the game, and how it is evolving.
You can play the current build of Shard Cycle right now.