Ever Roach
Steam, 2026, Solo Developed
A small solo precision platformer built in 2–3 months to learn the Steam publishing pipeline while exploring tight controls, structured difficulty, and deliberate challenge design.
The Goal
I wanted to build something small enough to finish, but focused enough to explore some core design principles. The project gave me an opportunity to learn the Steam publishing process while putting those principles into practice.
The game was built around a small set of simple mechanics and tight controls, with difficulty coming from how those mechanics were combined rather than constantly introducing new ones.
Designing Challenge
I used atomic design principles to structure the difficulty, breaking challenges down into individual input parameters and gradually increasing their complexity.
Rather than simply making jumps harder, levels explored different challenges around:
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Input Timing
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Input Frequency
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Input Distance
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Input Chain Length
This allowed me to create more interesting challenges from a relatively small mechanical vocabulary, combining familiar platforming obstacles in ways that tested the player's understanding and execution.
Player Experience
The game also has a simple narrative thread about being looked down on, staying determined, and continuing forward no matter what - and refusing to due. This was partly inspired by my own move from the UK to Australia and my first encounter with cockroaches.
Iteration & Challenges
One of the biggest challenges was getting the movement, hitboxes and input timings feeling consistent. Small inconsistencies can make or break a precision platformer, so I spent a lot of time tuning collision and movement behaviour and testing across different frame rates and hardware.
I never wanted the player to feel that the game was at fault for their deaths, and the game needed to be responsive, consistent and predictable to ensure this.
I also experimented with how collectibles worked. Initially, mushrooms were collected immediately on contact, which encouraged players to take dangerous "suicide routes" where they could grab an item without needing to successfully navigate back. I changed this to require the player to return to a safe point to secure the collectible, inspired by a similar solution in Celeste. I was happy to lean on an established design solution when it solved the problem cleanly rather than reinventing the wheel.
Local playtesting helped me identify balance issues, tune controls, catch bugs and understand where the difficulty was coming from.
What I Learned
This project was intentionally small, but it reinforced some important lessons for me as a designer:
Tight mechanics make small differences matter. Input timing, collision and movement consistency require far more attention when the game is built around precision.
Good difficulty comes from understanding what you're testing. By isolating input parameters and combining them deliberately, I could create challenge without needing a huge number of mechanics.
Shipping is part of the design process. Building the game was only one part of the project. Learning the Steam publishing pipeline, playtesting, fixing problems and getting the game into players' hands were equally valuable.