Dee Mbeki
Independent game developer — design & code
Manchester, UK
I make small, mean, finishable games. Four shipped, one that ate two years and never came out, and a job before all that making other people's games run at 60fps. I do the design and most of the code; I hire out for art and music because I know what I am not good at.
Shipped
TALLGRASS
Survival roguelike · 2024A farming game where the crops fight back. Eighteen months, two people, 140,000 copies sold in the first year. Sat at 94% positive across roughly 6,000 reviews, which I still find slightly unnerving.
mbekigames.example/tallgrassLAST BUS
Narrative game · 2022Ninety minutes, one bus route, eleven passengers who will not shut up. Made in four months on purpose after the last project nearly finished me. Nominated for Narrative at the Northern Games Awards.
mbekigames.example/lastbusSCRAPHEAP DERBY
Local multiplayer · 2020Four people, one sofa, cars made of garbage. Built for an arcade cabinet at a Manchester bar and then ported because people kept asking. Still my best-selling thing per hour of work.
NORTHWIND
Cancelled · 2016 — 2018An open-world sailing game that got too big for one person and stayed too big for three. Killed it at the two-year mark. I write about the postmortem more often than I write about the games that shipped, because it is the one people learn from.
grit
Open-source 2D toolkitThe collision, input-buffering and save layer I kept rewriting, extracted into something reusable. About 3,100 stars. Two commercial games I had nothing to do with now ship with it.
github.com/deembeki/gritJam games
Ongoing · 31 and countingThirty-one weekend games since 2015. Three of them turned into real projects and the rest taught me what not to spend a year on. All free, all playable, most of them bad.
mbekigames.example/jamsWork
Founder & developer
2019 — PresentManchester
- Design, code, production and the tax return. Four titles shipped.
- Run a small contract network — artist, composer, QA — rather than hiring; it keeps the studio the size of my nerve.
- Self-published everything. Talking directly to players is the part I would not give up.
Gameplay Programmer
2016 — 2019Leeds
- Combat and traversal systems on a mid-size action game with a team of forty.
- Owned the frame budget for two years. Learned what shipping to certification actually costs.
- Left because I wanted to make the decisions, not implement them well.
QA Analyst
2014 — 2016Leeds
- Two years finding other people's bugs, which is the best design education I have had.
- Wrote the automation that replaced the worst of my own job.
What I do
Craft
Systems design, level design, gameplay code, narrative structure, playtestingTools
Godot, Unity, C#, GDScript, Rust, Aseprite, FMODBusiness
Self-publishing, store pages, press outreach, contractor managementEducation
Manchester Metropolitan University
2011 — 2014Final-year project was a physics toy nobody could play. Instructive.
Word of mouth
Dee sent us a build with a note listing everything wrong with it before we asked. That is not normal and I wish it were.
She cut a whole feature I had already drawn art for, paid me for it anyway, and the game was better. Easiest client I have.
Best frame-budget instincts on the team, and she made the rest of us better at profiling by refusing to do it for us.
Talks & writing
How I Killed a Two-Year Game
2023The NORTHWIND postmortem. Roughly 40,000 views on the recording, which says something about how common this is.
Small Games, Loudly
2021 — PresentNumbers, mistakes and actual sales figures from a one-person studio. About 9,000 subscribers.
Mentor, Northern Games Collective
2022 — PresentMostly talking people out of their NORTHWIND.