Three months. Twelve weeks. One impossible deadline.
After seven months of development, we still had zero minutes of gameplay.
This is the story of what happened next.
October 27th, 2025
Exactly three months before the PlayStation MENA Hero Project submission deadline, I realized that the way we had been developing the prototype wasn’t getting us where we needed to go.
We had built gameplay systems, tools, and technologyโbut they hadn’t yet come together into a cohesive playable experience.
The team was exhausted after months of volunteer work, and I knew we needed a completely different approach.
Then I came up with an idea I jokingly called:
The Minute-by-Minute Game Jam
Instead of spending weeks building systems for some distant future, I would treat every one or two minutes of gameplay as its own mini game jam.
Every week would have one mission:
Build something playable.
Twelve weeks.
One or two playable minutes every week.
That became the plan.
Week One โ Build the Road
The story begins with the protagonist leaving the job he hates and walking alone along a lonely highway through a foggy forest at night.
So the first goal was simple:
Build the environment where the journey begins.
I started searching through FAB for forest and highway environments that could give me the foundation I needed.
For almost two days, it felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all.
Downloading packs.
Opening projects.
Closing them.
Trying another one.
Eventually, I found a forest environment that had almost everything I needed.
Then the real work began.
I widened the highway, reshaped the landscape, adjusted the sidewalks, changed the lighting, and added the fog.
Because, of course…
Every mysterious forest deserves good fog. ๐
Then I hit a major problem.
The performance was terrible.
No matter how much I optimized or reduced the graphics settings, the frame rate remained painfully low.
I thought I had a serious optimization problem on my hands.
It turned out to be something much simpler.
A month later, I discovered that I had accidentally enabled Use Fixed Frame Rate in the project settings long before I even started developing the prototype.
One tiny checkbox.
Several weeks of confusion.
Welcome to indie game development.
But after nearly a week of work, I finally had it:
A one-kilometer highway cutting through a foggy forest at night.
For the first time, the concept art wasn’t just an idea anymore.
It was a real place I could actually walk through.
And that’s when I knew…
The method was working.
I wasn’t just building systems anymore.
I was building a game.
Week Two
With the first milestone completed, I started planning the next one:
- The Thinking System
- Dialogue
- Three MetaHuman characters
- Voice acting
- Screenwriting
- Environmental audio
The prototype was finally starting to come together.
But the goal was always bigger than simply finishing a prototype.
I wanted Rare Castle to become a PlayStation studio.
And the crazy part?
I had already become a PlayStation Partner, and the project already had a PlayStation Store Concept Page.
But getting there…
was only the beginning.
Now I had to prove I could actually build the game.
And I had only three months.
๐ฌ Watch Dev Diary #1
This is the first chapter of the Dev Diary, my flagship development series documenting the real journey behind building the prototypeโfrom the setbacks and difficult decisions to the milestones and breakthroughs.
Three months. One prototype. One dream.
And this is where the journey begins.
๐ Support the Project
If you’d like to follow the development and support the project, you can wishlist the game on the PlayStation Store.
Every wishlist helps more people discover the project and supports the journey toward bringing the game to life.
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