Hi, I'm Hải. I took the long way round to making games.

Nguyen Thanh Hai Founder, Disa Games Ho Chi Minh City

  1. A plan in a spreadsheet

    In 2016, my first year of college, I applied late to Bookie, a Vietnamese reading community, with a plan in an Excel file. They took me anyway, and I'm still one of its co-founders.

  2. Seven years of backend

    Then came about seven years of backend work: the part of an app nobody sees until it breaks. I left it believing one thing: understanding the problem matters more than writing the code.

  3. A few games, set aside

    I tried several game ideas and built a few of them before this one, then set each one down. Every one left me plenty of lessons; the biggest: one person who isn't an artist can't draw everything alone.

  4. Disa Games, now

    Now I make games full-time at Disa Games, my indie studio. I'm building Clockwork Brood in Godot: an insect kingdom builds a giant machine in its own image, and you're the engineer who puts it together and decides how it fights.

Fig. 1 — How a backend engineer in Ho Chi Minh City ends up making a game about insects.