TIM RUSWICKI'm Tim Ruswick. I've shipped 29 games since 2015, from a precision platformer set in Hell to a card game about murderous bunnies. On YouTube I show how they're designed, what failed, and why.
Three you can play right now.
Love is literal Hell and every enemy is a heart. More than 100 levels built around the five stages of grief.
It's like the Dark Souls of Valentine's Day.
A roguelite tactics game about freeing farm animals from a fight club in space. Capture any enemy and make it fight for you.
A two-player card game where every ability has a trigger, and every turn could be your last.
29 games
I made my first game at 12, mashing together the parts I loved from the trading card games I played obsessively. Since 2015 I've shipped 29 more: game jam entries, small Android experiments, an MMO that ran inside Discord, a precision platformer on Steam and a card game funded on Kickstarter.
A lot of them were built live on stream, with my audience pitching ideas and writing the music. On YouTube I break down how games are designed, what goes wrong, and what it takes to keep making them.
I was Director of Marketing at GameDev.tv, helping new developers learn the fundamentals, and I co-founded DevPods.gg.
I partner with studios, tools, publishers and brands, from a short segment in a regular video to a full dedicated video.
Former Director of Marketing at GameDev.tv · Co-founder of DevPods.gg
A short integration inside one of my regular videos.
A full video built around your game, tool or product.
A vertical video built around your product for Shorts, TikTok and Reels.
Sponsorships, the media kit, collabs, press, or just saying hi. Send me a note and I'll get back to you.
PLUNDER EVERYTHING! A top-down strategy game where you spawn hundreds of units to raid villages. Pick a unit type, click the map to drop it in, and watch it go. Every unit is single-use, so managing your resources gets chaotic fast.
There are about 30 hand-built levels before procedural generation takes over. Pixel art, deliberately absurd comedy, and no audio. I made it solo in Construct 3 for Ludum Dare 58, and it plays in the browser on itch.io.
A two-player strategy card game where every ability has a trigger, and every turn could be your last. A game takes about 15 minutes.
The Kickstarter ran from May 17 to June 17, 2021. 292 backers pledged $13,890 against a $10,000 goal.
A turn-based tactics roguelite on a minimal, chess-like barnyard grid. You move one unit per turn through three zones, each capped by a boss. The hook: beat an enemy and you can capture it, adding it to your roster for good.
There are over a dozen capturable creatures, each with its own movement pattern, attack range and special ability, so positioning and team-building matter. Apples are the currency for recruiting new allies between fights. Made solo for the 7DRL Challenge 2020.
Love is Hell. A precision platformer built around the five stages of grief. Follow Stuart through 100+ levels across six hellish realms, hunted by more than 25 kinds of heart-shaped demons, with four major boss fights along the way.
Tight controls, puzzles, voice acting, cutscenes and an original soundtrack. Collectible heart pieces for completionists and full controller support. Released on Steam on February 10, 2020, with achievements and cloud saves.
It's like the Dark Souls of Valentine's Day.
Build your ship. Survive the elements. Rescue your crew. Made for Ludum Dare 45, where the theme was “Start with nothing.” Your ship is destroyed and your crew is scattered across space. Rebuild piece by piece from scavenged parts, then go back for as many of them as you can.
Ship building is physics-based, so it gets chaotic: pile too many parts on one side and you’ll spin out. Drag parts into place with the mouse; A, S and D fire the red, green and blue components. Made as a two-person team.
DAEMONS NEVER DIE. A turn-based hacking roguelike. You play >NEON_DREAM, a hacker breaking into a corporation’s mainframe. Move through procedurally generated server nodes and use hacking abilities to bend the environment and get past daemons, each with its own behavior protocol.
Permadeath: finish the run or start over. I did the art, code and design solo in seven days for Cyberpunk Jam 2019. It plays in the browser on itch.io.
SCAVENGE & SURVIVE! You and your son are stranded on a decaying mining outpost, slowly falling into a dying sun. Explore the derelict station, find resources, reroute power and repair the ship before time runs out.
There are two endings: launch alone, or find a way out together. A full run takes about five minutes. Made for the Timdred Jam. I did the programming, Kindred did the art, sound and atmosphere, and SteampunkChinChilla wrote the music.
Seriously. A Flappy Bird-style dodger played entirely on a single line. Obstacles arrive as the letter “D”, and your score is shown in unary, so a score of 5 reads 11111.
Made with my stream audience.
My Ludum Dare 43 entry. The theme was “Sacrifices must be made.” Built solo in Construct 3, with music from my stream audience. It plays on the Ludum Dare site.
GET REKT OR DIE TRYIN’. A top-down roguelite shooter. Help Shooty McPinkface defeat the smelly shape legion and steal their money. Fight waves of geometric enemies with a pistol, shotgun and rifle, and spend what you earn on upgrades.
WASD to move, click to shoot. Later levels throw a lot more at you. Made solo for JimJam #2.
A platformer with no movement controls. You’re an evil chick using a magnet to drag a metal superhero egg through a collapsing villain’s lair. Click to switch on the magnet; it recharges when you let go.
Three levels with checkpoints, plus coins you can magnetize too. Made for Game Maker’s Toolkit Jam 2018. A post-jam update added an unlimited magnet mode.
My Ludum Dare 42 entry. The theme was “Running out of space.” Made with ideas and help from my stream audience, and my first game in Construct 3.
My Ludum Dare 41 entry. The theme was “Combine 2 incompatible genres.” I built it solo in Construct 3, and my stream audience made the music.
An MMO that runs entirely inside Discord. Players shared one persistent world and played it through bot commands in chat. It was an experiment in using a chat app as a game engine, and I open-sourced it after the project wound down.
My Ludum Dare 40 entry, built solo in 48 hours for the Compo. The theme was “The more you have, the worse it is.”
A 2017 Android game, made solo in Construct 2. I finished it live on stream as part of my #FinishFriday series.
A 2017 Android game, made solo in Construct 2. I finished it live on stream as part of my #FinishFriday series.
A calming mobile game made with a wellness clinic to help with focus and anxiety. It’s meant to soothe rather than stress you out, and it was my test of whether a game could play a therapeutic role. Built solo in Construct 2 for Android, and finished live on stream as part of my #FinishFriday series.
A 2017 Android game, made solo in Construct 2. I finished it live on stream as part of my #FinishFriday series.
A 2017 Android game, made solo in Construct 2. I finished it live on stream as part of my #FinishFriday series.
A 2017 Android game, made solo in Construct 2. I finished it live on stream as part of my #FinishFriday series.
My Ludum Dare 39 entry, made solo in Construct 2. The theme was “Running out of power.”
Find and restore the lost ARTifacts to please the Indie overlord. A 2D platformer set after “the great crash”: hunt down the ARTifacts scattered through each level. Arrow keys to move, up to jump, and a run only takes a few minutes.
Made for the GDL March Madness Jam in March 2017. Rated 4.7 out of 5 on itch.io.
A 2017 PC game, made solo in Construct 2.
A 2017 Android game, made solo in Construct 2.
A political satire management game from Ludum Dare 37. You’re the president in an escalating crisis: tweet, take phone calls and search the internet to keep your temper and stop things from spiralling. Made solo in Construct 2.
A 2016 PC game, made in Construct 2 with a team of four.
A 2016 Android game, made in Construct 2 with a team of three.
A dark-comedy action game from Ludum Dare 34. Save the planet by collecting blood and organs from as many organ donors as you can. You control a robot that grows bigger and stronger as it eats.
Arrow keys to move, E to grab, Q to hit, W to throw. Made in Construct 2 with a team of three.
