← Home

The Simple Game That Took Me 6 Years to Release

Published • Last Updated • 4 minutes

I wanted to make a simple game that would take 30 seconds to play while you were commuting to work, standing in line, or otherwise bored. I came up with an idea in January 2018 and demoed a fully functional game in September of the same year. I finally released it in April 2024.

Why did it take me this long? What happened?

Let me take you on a journey into my mind. A mind wrought with dreams of unit tests, continuous integration, documentation, separation of concerns, and, my favorite, open source.


I just wanted to make a game. I had just shelved a prototype I had been working on for months because of an issue I could not solve without learning Blender for the umpteenth time. It was an AR game where you could build a golf course from pre-built pieces and then play it.

A few nights later, I was sitting in my living room fiddling with a deck of cards. Then I started tossing them onto my card table to see if I could get them to land face up. I began to see if I could throw a specific number of cards onto the table to make a decent poker hand.

Picture of a coffee table with playing cards on and around it.
This is my first attempt at playing Flip Jacks on a coffee table with real playing cards.

"Huh." I thought, "This could be my next game."

And so it was. Over the next few months, I built a working prototype. I even demoed it at an event before PAX East 2018. This prototype was built to be pretty simple. It worked on a desktop with mouse controls and on mobile with touch controls. Simple enough.

However, once I started building more features, I found some of Unity's built-in functionality lacking. Like most developers I've talked to, I solved this by creating a small library of reusable components and functions.

This is where it all broke down.

I love open source and sharing what I've learned. So, when I started building simple, reusable components and functions in Unity, I wanted to share them. However, sharing them as is wouldn't work; I would need to clean them up, add tests and documentation, and release them publicly on GitHub. My first open source repo was a collection of these reusable components called CandyCoded.

After I made the component library, I realized I would need an AR component library. So, I polished up my custom AR components, wrote a bunch of documentation, and released that as well.

You can see where this is going.

The same thing happened when I built anything reusable, which is why all of these (16) open source projects exist.

I even open sourced my poker logic as a C# only library.

This process took years. And because I found excitement in releasing open source packages, I started to lose interest in the reason I started down this path in the first place.

Within the first year of development, I rekindled my interest in the game after demoing it at a local game showcase called BostonFIG.

Picture of me standing at my booth at BostonFIG.
Picture of me standing at my booth at BostonFIG 2018.
Picture of a table with two iPads, one with Flip Jacks the game on it and another with a newsletter sign up form. A TV is behind the iPads with the iPad showing Flip Jacks on the screen. There are also a bunch of playing cards and poker chips on the table.
Close up shot of the booth at BostonFIG 2018.

Unfortunately, even that didn't motivate me enough to finish and release it.

Another issue that contributed to my not releasing the game earlier was that I wasn't marketing my game. Because of this, I had no outside accountability aside from myself and people I knew personally. This was a massive factor in my not releasing the game earlier.

But in the end, I finally released it. I'm happy I did, and I'm proud of my work.

Will I market it now that it's out? Probably not. It was, first and foremost, a passion project, but it was also a way for me to learn Unity. Maybe I'll market my next game before it comes out in six years.

Am I making a new game? I am! It's a rhythm game like Guitar Hero or Rock Band, and as is tradition, I'm building an open source library first. Because of course I am.

Wait, before you go, I should probably share the link to the game I've been talking about right?

flipjacksgame.com