I'm going to step outside the usual tone of this blog for a moment. Today is not about how the infra is wired, balance in Triara, or how to pick a tank for the Arena. Today is about why I do this. And, like almost everything that matters in my relationship with video games, it starts a long way back.
A short (biased, badly told) history of video games
Video games have been with us longer than people often realise. Before the Game Boy existed, people were already feeding coins into wooden cabinets with tiny screens. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man… games that fit in a single idea and lasted until you ran out of coins or patience.
Then home consoles arrived and everything shifted. The NES, the Mega Drive, the Super Nintendo. Suddenly you didn't have to go anywhere: the game lived in the living room, fighting the VHS for the TV cable. Sonic ran, Mario jumped, Link looked for Zelda, and, in my particular case, someone always ended up saying "okay, one last game" at eleven at night.
Then came the CD generation, the weird-looking 3D games that we somehow loved, the PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the huge Final Fantasys that swallowed entire summers. And later, the internet. Games stopped being a person sitting in front of a TV and became something you could share with a friend in another city, or a stranger on the other side of the world.
Today a game can be a whole universe with thousands of players at once, or a website that opens in two seconds and entertains you for five minutes on the metro. That second category, the small one, is where I live.
What stuck with me
I'm not going to make an exhaustive list because it would be unfair to most of the 90s catalogue, but there are three ideas that got burned into me as a kid and still push me when I open the editor.
First: a game can be very small and still make you come back. Tetris doesn't need a story. Neither did Minesweeper. And yet, here they are, thirty years later, still hooking people.
Second: the feeling of discovering things (a shortcut, a new ability, a secret) is one of the best rewards there is. And that, when a game respects you, it lets you find things on your own instead of dragging you along with a giant arrow.
Third: playing is one of the few things we do without a useful goal. You're not producing anything, not solving the world, not answering to anyone. You're just there, having fun. That kind of freedom is rare, and even rarer today.
Why I make games
Here's the personal part. I work in technical stuff. Meetings, decisions, planning, code that has to hold real traffic, problems where you can't really afford to be wrong. It's a job I like, but it takes up a very specific part of the brain and, by the end of the day, that part is tired.
Making games turns on a different part. And it does it in very specific ways:
For the freedom. When I design a game on erandel.com I don't have to ask anyone. If I want Triara's combat to be automatic, it's automatic. If I want Picturim to have two modes instead of one, it has them. If an idea doesn't work, I change it with no meeting. It's the kind of creative freedom that the "serious" job rarely has in pure form.
For the relaxation. It sounds odd because programming is also work, but making games on my own actually relaxes me. It's code without outside pressure. If I break something, no client is waiting for an urgent call. If a mechanic takes three weeks to click, fine. I set the clock.
For the escape. When I finish the day and open the Triara or Picturim repo, I'm not thinking about work. I'm thinking about how to balance an ability, which image to put as the daily challenge, or how to write a class that feels unique in combat. It's the best mental "airplane mode" I've found.
For the people. And this one is maybe the biggest. Someone, somewhere, opening one of my games on their phone while they wait for the bus and smiling, even for a second. That justifies any late night spent in code. It's not a metric that shows up on any dashboard, but it's the one I care most about.
Why small games
I don't make AAA games, and I don't want to. I have no team, no budget, no interest in building 80-hour open worlds. What I can do is make small games — finished, maintained, honest. A turn-based RPG you can play in ten-minute sessions. A word-guessing game you understand in thirty seconds. A tower defense with a nice little twist.
If I think about it, that fits what struck me about games when I was a kid: the idea that something small can be memorable. Tetris is not an open world. Pac-Man isn't either. And they've kept working for decades.
What I hope you take away
If you made it this far, thank you. It's not common for someone to read a full post about why a particular person does a particular thing. If you take one idea away, let it be this: video games don't have to be big to matter. They can be a five-minute screen at a coffee shop, a quick match on the bus, a team of three champions you put together at eleven at night.
That human scale is the one I like. And as long as I can keep shipping games at that scale, I will.
If you want to see what's there so far, it's all on the games page. And if you feel like dropping me an idea for a next game or post, the contact page is always open.