To make better coffee and find fulfillment.

For some backstory, my boyfriend and I both have our birthdays in November and last year we decided to gift our caffeine addictions to each other. I bought him a teapot and some teas, while he bought me a kettle and a coffee grinder. Slowly but surely we have been converting each other to the point where our mornings start with pour over coffee and our nights end with green tea.

Pour over coffee is a satisfying sensory experience that is more than just drinking the coffee itself. My morning routine is no longer complete without the smell of freshly ground coffee beans, eagerly waiting for bubbles to form as the coffee blooms, and listening to the slow methodical drip of coffee parsing through the filter. However, it’s not all fun and games. There are a lot of numbers and steps to remember if you want to make a coffee that also tastes good in the end.

Pour over coffee requires two key apparatus - a scale and a timer. It also requires the art of repetition and precision. The exact things I do not have in my half-awake morning state. Finding it hard to keep track of all the pour over steps, I made myself a note card that I stuck to my kitchen counter. Despite the coffee stains, it had worked really well.

That was, until I bought the Tokyo Kissa beans from Blue Bottle.

The Tokyo Kissa bean were a new species of coffee beans that I hadn’t encountered before - a dark roast. As someone who likes to try new things, picking a coffee I had never tried before and had no experience with was a no-brainer. However, what happened next may not surprise you. It tasted awful.

Roast level doesn’t just change the taste, it changes the preparation steps. The grind size had to be larger and the water temperature had to be lower. It took several days of testing different settings before it finally tasted decent. That was when I knew my note card was about to become overwhelmingly complicated. Which is exactly how I landed on the idea for Bean.

Bean is an app for pour over coffee enthusiasts, “Strava for pour over coffee” if you will, and has 3 key features:

1. It walks me through how to make pour over coffee each morning.

2. It tracks which beans I’ve tried and whether I liked them.

3. It lets me share the brew I made with my friends.

Over the past month I’ve made substantial progress towards releasing Bean, including but not limited to:

• Writing a one-pager on my vision for Bean.

• Bingeing Youtube videos on pour over coffee (thank you James Hoffmann).

• Sketching ideas in my notebook.

• Creating an Expo app using Supabase then relinquishing all technical decision-making to my $100 a month Claude subscription.

• Making UX edits after every brewed cup of coffee.

• Drawing art assets using oil pastels.

• And finally, saving countless Instagram Reels on marketing and content creation.

My excitement is more than just this checklist of things though. It’s all the moments I’ve spent dreaming about what Bean could be and what I have the potential to create. It’s writing down ideas on my phone in the middle of the night, it’s prompting Claude while doing chores, it’s taking photos of random plants and signs as inspiration for my color palette, and it’s feeling like working hard on something can be fun and rewarding.

The key realization I had in my last post was that to me, fulfillment is building cool things and sharing them. I still want to build the game I shared, but first I want to build up my skills creating something from start to finish and sharing my journey as I do it. A game is a multi-year endeavour, whereas Bean is already nearly ready to launch.

In this blog, I’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes insights and my learnings along the way as I create Bean and dive deeper into the world of caffeine addiction. Follow along as I find fulfillment while making better coffee.

Sign up for updates at: https://www.makecoffee.app/

Let me know what part of Bean you’d like to hear about next.

Blog post #1 - Progress update

What I’ve done so far:

• Wrote a one-pager on the vision for Bean.

• Watched a lot of videos on pour over coffee.

• Prototype is ready minus the social features.

• Designed a landing page.

What I’ll do next:

• Learn how to create social media content.

• Get the app working on TestFlight.

Play as a cat who works at a post office for spirits, delivering letters across the ruins of a forgotten town.

There’s only one problem. I don’t know how to build a game and I probably have imposter syndrome. Luckily, what I do have is enthusiasm.

This is the first devlog in my journey to make my next game.

Over a year ago, I designed and illustrated a cozy mobile game called Sandwich Swipe. The game made its way to the App Store’s Best New Games list in several countries and has been downloaded by over 20,000 users.

Since then I’ve moved cities, tried out a mix of artistic hobbies, and felt mildly aimless. Now I’m ready to throw myself back into the world of game development.

Sandwich Swipe was the last thing I made that I was deeply proud of. Nothing brings more of a smile to my face than people telling me they enjoyed the game. What started with an unpolished pitch and pen-and-paper sketch is now an actual app. Isn’t that crazy? I even downloaded it on my new phone the other day and I’m slowly making my way through the levels again. I unashamedly find it fun to play.

Chasing the high of Sandwich Swipe, I’ve decided to make another game. The tentative game name is Melted and it’s a story-driven exploration and rogue-lite game. I’ve been sketching ideas for a while now and have finally reached the stage where I have enough clarity to start. I’m feeling naively ambitious, so this time, we’re doing it on hard-mode.

Here is a summary of my game idea and some concept sketches to go along with it.

Melted

Play as a cat who works at a post office for spirits, delivering letters across the ruins of a forgotten town.

The post office manager has suddenly disappeared, leaving you to take over their job. Spirits are waiting for their letters to be delivered, but the mailboxes are scattered across dangerous parts of the map filled with obstacles, puzzles, and enemies.

Each run, the player chooses a letter and attempts to reach the delivery location before their health runs out. The world is a fixed map that players gradually learn through repeated runs, discovering shortcuts and annotating routes on their mini-map as they master increasingly difficult areas.

Every successful delivery reveals part of a spirit’s story, and slowly you will unravel the mystery of the manager’s disappearance.

This new game has nearly everything we explicitly decided not to do in Sandwich Swipe. The scope is bigger. There will be real characters and complex storylines. It’ll be cross-platform, targeting desktop and console, and I want the animations to be illustrated.

I’m going to be the sole illustrator, animator, programmer, script writer and marketer. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t overwhelmed. In one sense, starting this blog is a form of procrastination, but in another, it’s taking the first necessary step in a very long but exciting journey.

Despite my job as a software engineer and having taken some game development courses in university, I’m particularly nervous to learn Unity and dive into the world of event listeners, shaders, and physics engines. The last time I created a game by myself in Unity was when I followed a roll-a-ball tutorial in 2019–and then decided to make it chicken-themed for a laugh.

Illustration has always come a lot more naturally for me than programming, so I clung to it during Sandwich Swipe instead of overcoming my fears and touching some of the code. As a result, I have no idea how to approach game architecture.

This time though I want it to be different. I want to make a game to touch people’s hearts while simultaneously teaching myself that you can just do things. I’m also excited to put all the lessons I learned from Sandwich Swipe into practice.

Subscribe, and follow along with my journey as I make this new game!

I’ll be sharing blog posts with behind-the-scenes art, progress updates, and reflections. If you have any learning resources, ideas or game feedback to share, let me know, I’d love to hear from you.

Blog post #0 progress update

What I’ve done:

• Wrote a game one-pager

• Created some concept sketches

What I’ll do next:

• Draw some placeholder sprites for the player character

• Make the Unity game project

• Create a marketing plan