The first game I tried to make needed a game studio, a toy manufacturer, custom hardware, and a distribution network.
I could not code.
Looking back, that combination says almost everything about how I entered gaming: the ambition arrived long before the skills, and I had no idea how much I did not know.
A toy car and a portal
In high school, I had a friend named Phil who was seriously good at Blender. Another friend was obsessed with model cars, not Hot Wheels but the detailed collector kind. When I was younger, my favorite game was Skylanders, where placing a physical figure on a portal brought that character into the game.
Those pieces collided in my head. What if you could buy a physical model car, place it on a portal, and race that exact car in a video game?
I thought the idea was genius. I called Phil and pitched it to him. He agreed to handle the 3D modeling. That left me with what I described, very casually, as "only the coding."
The problem was that I had no coding experience and was not even deeply immersed in gaming. I had started with the company-sized idea and worked backward toward learning what an engine was.
Learning Unreal by taking things apart
My research led me to Unreal Engine. I learned by opening projects, moving things around, breaking them, and trying to put them back together. Most of my progress came through kit-bashing: taking marketplace assets made by other people and combining them until the screen started to resemble the game in my head.
The result was not elegant, but it was the first time an idea of mine became interactive. I could press a button and watch something happen because I had assembled it that way. That feeling pulled me in.
I would love to say the car game went on to make a million dollars. It did not get close to finished.
The software alone was beyond my experience, but the real scope was even larger. The idea also required physical cars, a working portal, manufacturing, inventory, and distribution. I had accidentally chosen one of the hardest possible first projects.
Eventually, I put it aside.
Trying again, only bigger
My next idea was a superhero game.
At the time, I was obsessed with superheroes. I wanted a game where flying felt completely free and where the player could experience the full power of being a hero. Once again, the idea was much larger than what I could build by myself. This time, at least, I understood that part.
I joined Discord servers and posted revenue-share listings anywhere developers and artists might see them. Slowly, a team formed. I found some incredibly talented developers and artists who believed enough in the idea to help.
Around that period, I incorporated Lemon Tree Studio. At first it was a practical decision: I wanted a proper home for the work and a way to protect the assets we were creating. But it also made the ambition feel real. This was no longer just a project folder on my computer. I had named the thing I wanted to build.
When momentum is not a plan
For a while, development moved forward. Then the size of the game and the weakness of the planning began to catch up with us.
A revenue-share team can run on excitement for a while, but excitement is not production. Without a realistic scope, clear ownership, or money behind the work, momentum slowly disappeared. People became less active. Messages stopped. Eventually, the team was gone.
There was no dramatic ending. The project simply became quieter until it was no longer moving.
That experience taught me something the car game had already been trying to teach me: having a big vision is not the same as having a path to build it.
Why I moved to mobile
After two oversized PC game ideas, I knew I needed a shorter feedback loop. I moved toward mobile games because they offered exactly that: faster iterations, clearer numbers, and a way to learn what players actually respond to without spending years building in isolation.
Mobile was not a retreat from ambition. It was a change in how I planned to earn it.
Instead of beginning with the biggest world I could imagine, I could begin with a mechanic. Build it. Put it in front of people. Measure what happened. Improve it or let it go. Then repeat.
What actually got me into gaming
Neither of those early games shipped. One never escaped the portal idea; the other disappeared with its team. But together, they brought me into Unreal, introduced me to developers and artists, and pushed me to create Lemon Tree Studio.
More importantly, they changed the way I think about building.
I still believe in ideas that are probably too big. The difference is that now I care just as much about the system underneath them: scope, iteration, feedback, and a team that can keep moving after the initial excitement fades.
The games I was not ready to build are the reason I am still building games today.