How to Develop a Computer Game: From Idea to Launch

1. I Make Computer Games with AI

When I told my students at school that I had made a computer game, some of them stayed after class instead of going home, asking me to teach them how to make one. When I asked what kind of game they wanted to make, they said things like horror games, escape room games, and dress-up games. One child acted out a monster character as if the idea were completely their own — but it turned out to be an already popular game. They showed me the character on their phone, and it seemed like they wanted to make something similar. I haven’t made a Roblox game myself, but I’ll try to explain the process I used to make my games in a way that’s easy to follow.

Fortunately, developing computer games doesn’t cost much compared to other ventures. The total expenses I incurred from building my games all the way to launching the platform were: AI subscription fees, copyright registration fees, domain registration fees, and a new keyboard — because I broke my old one from pressing “ㅇ” too many times. Making something grand would require labor costs, but since I make “modest games,” I didn’t need much money. Releasing on Steam or Google Play requires separate registration fees, but I store my code on GitHub and distribute via web browser — keeping costs low while making access easy for users.

2. Game Ideas Are Like Crossbreeding

Game ideas work a lot like crossbreeding. Dr. Hyun Shin-gyu took two pine trees — the Loblolly pine, which grows fast but can’t handle the cold, and the Pitch pine, which is cold-hardy but slow-growing — and crossbred them into a new variety called the Rigiteda pine: fast-growing and cold-resistant.
Inventions work the same way — nothing is created from nothing. A band-aid combines gauze and adhesive tape. A Post-it note is paper with glue. Both are just two existing things put together. Now let’s look at Wordle, which took the world by storm.
Wordle = Hangman + Baseball Game + Color Hints

Wordle resembles Hangman in that you must guess a secret word within six tries. Revealing whether letters exist in the word, are absent, or are in the wrong position resembles a word-based baseball game. (You can play Baseball Game on my platform, Soosooland.) What makes Wordle different is that instead of text like S, B, or O, it uses color panels to give intuitive hints. Mix two or three familiar games, add something uniquely your own, and an entirely new game is born. My games all started from existing ones too.

Worpuzz = Minesweeper + Word Search + Daisies and Clover

Worpuzz has a grid like Minesweeper, but clicking a cell doesn’t reveal a mine or a number — it reveals English or Korean words hidden horizontally, vertically, and diagonally.

Play Worpuzz →

3. Before Building, Verify the Idea Is Original
If you start coding before checking whether something similar already exists, you could be wasting your effort. I’d ask AI or search online. If a similar game existed, I’d modify the rules — and sometimes that process helped me develop the idea further.

4. Plan the Name, Rules, and Screen

At first, I agonized over names the way a parent chooses a baby’s name — full of excitement. Trinkle’s working title was “세모땅” (Triangle Land), and Numzzle’s was “수공재” (Make Math Fun). Later, wanting to take my games global, I switched to English names — with a lot of help from ChatGPT and my family. Some names I was happy with turned out to already be in use, so always search before committing. The more games you make, the better you get at naming.

Of everything in game development, defining the rules matters most — and it’s entirely the developer’s job. On the other hand, designing the screen from scratch turned out to be the most pointless thing I did early on. Trinkle was originally a game I used to play with pen and notebook as a student, so I asked for notebook-style ruled lines in the background. That turned out to be surprisingly tricky to implement in code. It’s better to trust AI’s judgment on the initial screen design, receive the result, and refine from there.

5. Game Development Is Like Developing a Recipe

If you enjoy coding, go ahead — but time is precious. Let AI handle the coding, then run the code through an editor to test the game. I use Koder — it’s free, and since I work on an iPad, my options are limited. Ask AI to recommend a coding tool for your setup.

Test the game, and when something doesn’t work as intended, fix it. Let me compare game development to recipe development:

• Defining the rules (developer’s job): Before developing a new dish, you imagine the flavor, choose ingredients, and decide on the method. This is like defining the game rules.
• Coding (AI’s job): The cooking process is coding. AI handles this.
• Testing (developer’s job): Tasting the dish and deciding how to improve it is testing. AI absolutely cannot do this.

AI cannot design user experience. The robot chef cooked the food but has no idea what it tastes like. Personally, I find conceiving and developing game ideas fun — but testing is tedious. That said, when a bug shows up, my dopamine spikes and fixing it becomes exciting again.

Having someone else test the game instead of me has been enormously helpful, because they don’t play the way I expect. Thanks to that, I find bugs I’d never catch myself. When someone asks “how do I play this?”, I add clearer in-game instructions. If they say it’s too hard, I add an easy mode. If they say it’s too easy, I add a harder mode. “It’s boring” is the most valuable piece of feedback — it stings for a few seconds, then sends me straight into “how do I make this more fun?”

6. Giving an NPC a Brain Is the Hardest Part

In game development, designing the AI algorithm for NPCs is the biggest challenge. The computer has to think smarter than the user under the same conditions.

The Trinkle Cheating Incident: When developing Trinkle, the NPC character Trinky was supposed to draw triangles — but it started drawing a square first, then a diagonal, holding its turn, taking the user’s turn when a square was completed, scoring by forming two triangles from one square, then drawing another diagonal for four triangles. It was cheating. The breakthrough came when I suggested to Claude: “Let’s name every dot on the screen a, b, c, d… and every line segment ab, ac…” After that, the problem was solved.

Putting Claude Through Its Paces for Numzzle: Making the NPC smart for Numzzle was genuinely hard — or more accurately, Claude suffered more than I did. The game used operators including roots and pi, and Claude suggested, “If you let the user win sometimes, they’ll feel good about beating the NPC.” That’s not wrong, but if you want a game where you can beat the NPC, you should play something like Worpuzz, which has no single correct answer. So I pushed Claude relentlessly: “The NPC must be smarter. It needs to calculate two-digit plus two-digit numbers. 3π must be computed as 3 × π.” I kept at it until the NPC could produce a perfect answer every time.

7. 9,076 Uploads and Counting

There’s no need to make it perfect from the start. Aiming for perfection will mean never launching at all. The moment a game was functional, I uploaded it to GitHub and deployed it. From May 9, 2025 to May 29, 2026 — the day I’m writing this — I’ve uploaded and revised files on GitHub 9,076 times. GitHub stores every step of the process, protecting the developer’s rights.

In fact, copyright is automatically established the moment a game is created, so there’s no urgent need to file a formal registration. I still consider the games on Soosooland to be in beta and continue improving them.

8. The Games I Make Look Like Me

I’m still a beginner developer, and I’ve only shared enough here to be useful to others at the same level.

I’ve wondered why I don’t make the popular genres — shooters, incremental games, horror, escape rooms. I think the games you want to make end up resembling your own personality. When I play badminton, I spend more time picking up the shuttlecock than actually hitting it. Sure enough, none of my games require quick reflexes. At the gym, I love lifting weights — but always slowly, never heavy. So it makes sense that my games never rush the player; they’re designed to let you think as long as you like.

Since I make casual games with simple rules, everything is coded in pure HTML and JavaScript. I can’t offer guidance on cute character design or 3D animation — those are outside my world. AI capabilities are improving at a remarkable pace, so anyone starting game development now will have an easier time than I did, and can bring their own ideas to life with less struggle.

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