Nobody asked for a point-and-click adventure set in a dying 90s mall. Nobody asked for a turn-based RPG where your party fights a monster called the Algorithm. Nobody asked for a procedural forest sim, a brick-breaker, or a pong clone with a dog mascot.
These exist anyway, in a password-protected section of this site called the Arcade. I want to explain why — because the reason matters for how I think about work generally.
The Games
None of This Is a Business Decision
The games don't generate leads. They're not SEO plays. They're not in the pitch deck. Nobody hires a consultancy because they played a turn-based RPG about the Algorithm on the consultancy's private beta page.
They exist because they were interesting to make. Which sounds simple, but is unusual for something that lives under a business domain.
What Building Games Teaches You
Making a game — even a small, janky browser game — forces you to think about systems. You have to design an experience for someone who doesn't know what you know and hasn't made the decisions you made. You balance difficulty against accessibility, complexity against clarity, explanation against discovery.
That's the same problem as consulting. You're always designing a system — a strategy, a framework, a brand architecture — that has to work for someone who isn't you, in conditions you don't fully control. The feedback loops in game design are faster and more honest than in most business work, where "the strategy isn't landing" takes months to surface.
Building things that need to feel right makes you better at knowing when things don't. That's the skill that transfers, and it's hard to develop by only working on things you're paid to deliver.
The Brand Isn't Separate From This
There's a version of a consultancy website that's all case studies and "we increase your ROI." It's legitimate. It's also boring, and it tells you one specific thing about how someone works.
The Arcade says something different: this is a creative operation that makes things for the pleasure of making them — things that might be weird, things with no brief except "I want to see if this works." That's information about intellectual range, about whether someone brings energy to a project or just executes a spec. It's information that's hard to fake. You either built the point-and-click adventure game or you didn't.
What's Next
Two more games are in development — a top-down tank combat game and a digital Hearts with opinionated AI opponents. Both will be playable eventually. Neither is on a deadline, which is itself part of what the Arcade represents: work that's done when it's good, not when the schedule says.
That standard is harder to maintain in commercial work. The Arcade is where it gets practiced.