What it is
An action isometric roguelite set in an ancient-Egyptian world blended with sci-fi. Dual-wielding combat with combo finishers, a time-slowing mechanic, glyph upgrades, randomized levels, meta-progression. Windows and macOS, built in Unity with a team of five to eight at Amenti Studio.
The real story
It started as The Book of Thoth in 2021. A year in, our lead designer-developer called it: the assets and architecture weren’t good enough to carry the game. So we restarted. New name, new team, new ideas. That restart became Aaru, and it took four more years to ship.
What happened
We shipped. Players who found it liked it: 86% positive. Commercially it stayed small; it never earned back its years, and I’m planning to drop the price, maybe to free, just to get it played. Then the studio wound down: the team was tired, nobody wanted to start game two, and AI was improving so fast that hand-building another game felt like the wrong bet. There was never a formal ending. We just never came back.
What I learned
We spent too much on art and too little on concepts. We ran on a single developer for too long when the build needed two. And the pace of AI through 2024 made me reconsider the path itself: every month of hand-building bought less than the month before, and starting a second game the old way stopped making sense to me. The fix I believe in now: 1% improvement loops, iterating relentlessly instead of betting big. And the deepest one: finishing a hard thing is a skill in itself, and it’s transferable.
The full retro is in I shipped a game, then walked away. The build post-mortem (where the years went) is in We rebuilt the whole game once. The mistakes survived the rebuild.