TL;DR:
I worked on a game. Steam | Demo
Chrono Gear: Warden of Time is a retro 2D action game that mixes speedy platforming and sword combat with explorable hub areas and a dramatic story. that's what the Steam Store page will tell you.
Chrono Gear (CG) is not my own project, I was brought in to test and provide feedback a few months after the initial social media posts about it. I consistently provided feedback: testing every new build, finding as many ways as I could to break the engine, reproducing bugs, and detailing out my thoughts on how it felt and where it could go. After about a year, I was laid off from my day job and really dove into testing, not just finding bugs, but proposing solutions and highlighting the specific documentation to support it. To cut a long story short, I started just writing the code myself.
In the 10 months after, I dove headfirst into writing as much code as I could for CG. Many a refactor, secret, and QoL improvement were written over many sleepless nights, a coding fervor fueled by copious amounts of caffeine. Even after I found a new day job, I kept an unhealthy sleep schedule, often barely getting a nap before the day's commute where I thought of solutions to last night's problems and stole time from work in favor of progress on CG. I kept that energy up all the way up to the release date and then some, even promoting the game at AnimeNYC and the All for One concert.
I like to think that with as much time and effort I put into CG, there's a lot of me in that game, but I think it's safer to say that there's a lot of me in the code, in the technical implementation. Being many months removed now from the official development cycle, I've had more time to think about my relationship to CG; it is my first commercial release and as such, I feel a lot of ownership and responsibility over it. I continue to work on bugfixes, quality-of-life improvements, and implementations of content and features left on the cutting room floor for that reason. But in spite of that, I can't really say it's my game.
The game as a whole is a product of the ideas and expression that the players interact with: the gameplay mechanics and challenges, the narrative direction, the art design and presentation, the composition; all details that immediately imprint themselves as part of Chrono Gear. Those were done by people brave enough to take their ideas, toil over them, make them real, and present them to the rest of the world to judge, confident that they had made something worthwhile. It doesn't feel right sometimes to consider myself a peer to them because none of the ideas in the game are uniquely mine.
In contrast, my work was/is largely invisible: the never-ending hunt for bugs to fix, the witchcraft of refactoring code for cleanliness and efficiency, the thumb-blistering grind of playtesting over and over; things that don't fundamentally change the core of what CG is. If I have to be kind to myself, I was a supporter that managed technical debt from dragging the project down. But nothing I worked on actively contributed to or helped develop the identity of CG. Replace me with any other code monkey and CG is more or less the same. I think even without any of the work that I did, CG would've turned out the same CG: the same game that surprised people with how thoroughly great care was put into it, the same game that caused some people to rethink the potential of the holo Indie program, the same game that some people even call their 2025 Game of the Year. Just a little less performant.
Now, months later, as CG's daily player count continues its steady decline, it has found its player base almost completely - everyone who would have wanted to play the game for the most part already has. Short of a major content update, a push from an influencer, or a release on another platform, it's safe to say CG has lived its life. Yet I still work on it almost daily. There's at most a dozen or so people who appreciate the improvements, particularly the ones in service of the speedrun, but realistically my work from this point on is quite literally unseen. Hundreds of tweaks, fixes, and changes to make the experience a little smoother. All for a game that while I hold close, isn't something whose existence and success I feel I can claim much part of. Regardless, that aforementioned responsibility stops me from dropping the game even when everyone else has. But at least in that sense, as long as I am the sole steward, CG, in a cosmic sort of way, is my game.
but not really.
Chrono Gear is a good game, made by good people, that I just happened to be the code janitor for. It released on September 11, 2025 and is available to purchase and download on Steam.
