Why it took me 1 year to finish a 5-minute game

Click there to play the CATCHING FISHES theme!

Click here to play CATCHING FISHES, for free, on itch.io! (PC ONLY)

On January 20th, 2026, I released my first solo game: CATCHING FISHES, a short story about taking a bath when you’re very tired. But, even though the game itself is about 5 minutes long, developing it took… a bit more than that.

My work started on December 20th, 2024. I wanted to make a tiny game featuring my main character in the bathroom of his house. At first, it seemed I’d get it done quickly: it didn’t take me long to have him walking inside a bathroom.

But, as it turns out, a game is more than the sum of its parts. And it was only on January 20th, 2025, that I knew what my game was about. David Lynch had passed away on the 16th, and a good friend suggested I include an homage to him in my tiny game.

I love Lynch’s book Catching The Big Fish, and I love his views on ideas, creativity and art. That’s where CATCHING FISHES comes from: a tribute to Lynch, and to that weird place where ideas are born.

So, one year before the release, I already had the game’s title, core concept, environment, main character, and even the movement and interaction mechanics!

Why would this project still take 1 whole year?

A game is an elusive fish

This is a question that’s both very easy and surprisingly hard to answer.

In my previous CATCHING FISHES devlog, I focused on the more practical reasons behind the delay. And I’m certain everything I mentioned there, like starting the game in Unreal / taking too long to playtest, contributed to why it took so long.

However, this time I want to focus on the more… personal, or philosophical reasons. Now that the game is officially out, it’s easier for me to look back and see what I missed.

To show you what I mean, here’s one quote from that previous devlog:

“Anyway, when that failed, I decided to remake the chores system from the ground up. Now you can interact with anything at any time, and the obligatory chores have minigames - also, you can go through them in any order. Problem solved, right?”

This was written in July of 2025. At the time, I was working on some minigames, and you can see I was very optimistic about it! But, if you played CATCHING FISHES, you know the final game came out without any minigames!

So where did they go? What happened to them?

CATCHING FISHES Secret Level - The MINIGAMES!

Ok, there are no easter eggs, none of the minigames made it into the final game.

But I actually got pretty far into their development! I finished six of them, each related to a different bath chore. The idea was that you would only be able to take a bath after going through every minigame.

Just to show you what they looked like, here’s the one you had to beat in order to put on the shorts:

And this minigame was pretty well-received! It was a universal favorite for all the playtesters, and I was pretty proud of it.

However, remember there were SIX of them, each with a unique mechanic. So getting ONE minigame right didn’t mean they ALL worked. Again, to illustrate what I mean:

This one was… as fun as it looks! I had just played Mario Wonder and wanted to do something like the invisibility badge, but playtesting proved I didn’t deliver.

Basically, the problem with these minigames was that each one of them was, well, a mini GAME! This means each one would have to work as a game on its own, plus, they’d all have to be cohesive - and BALANCED! - with each other.

That’s quite a challenge even for experienced developers, so imagine what it was like for someone making her very first game! And CHALLENGE is the keyword here. Again, to quote from my previous devlog:

“And I wanted to incorporate this way of thinking into Catching Fishes. After all, what’s the fun of making a game without a little challenge?”

That quote may seem harmless, but at the time, it was a nagging question that eventually got stuck in my head.

the Challenges of Making a Game

Minigames came from a perspective of what my game SHOULD have in order to really qualify as a game. I was trying to answer an imaginary checklist of ‘what makes a game good’.

And I’m not saying these demands aren’t important, game development is a cruel industry and we have to weigh many factors. But I do believe there are more important things to consider. Like: what is this game I am making?

I subscribe to the idea that every creation has a want. There’s the thing I want to do to my game, but there’s also what my game wants to be, and I think it’s prudent to respect the latter.

This takes many shapes and forms, and sometimes, it’s just a matter of discarding a mechanic because it doesn’t fit, no matter how attached you are to it.

That might seem simple but, in my case, it took about 8 months of development before I truly understood what it means. I knew from January 20th, 2025 that my game would be centered around this quote:

But only on September 8th, 2025 did I truly take it to heart. That was the day I deleted the minigames, and started working on the music. Or: the day I stopped challenging myself, and just sat quietly for a bit.

Making a Game Without Challenges

At first, I envisioned minigames as challenges that contributed to the game’s flow: the player would mirror the character’s arc of getting tired and then finally relaxing. But, when I saw them in action, I couldn’t help but feel the minigames were getting in the way.

They didn’t feel right, and I know it’s not only a matter of concept, but also of my own skills (will get to that in a minute), but the concept part is also important.

Because CATCHING FISHES is not about the challenge.

It’s about what happens AFTER a challenge. That moment when you get home, and even though things are still a bit chaotic, you know you’re finally about to relax.

And, on a more personal level, CATCHING FISHES was about me making my first game. That’s where the skills part comes in: I had to create music, systems, character animation, an itch page, think of marketing… All of that for the first time, doing the best I could.

So not only was it important for me to understand the game I was making, it was also important to get who I was in making this game. What skills do I have? What can I deliver? What challenges can I overcome?

People who say you should make tiny games are absolutely right, but one tricky part is actually measuring the size of tiny that you can undertake. For me, trying to cram in SIX additional mini games was an absolute overkill. I couldn’t do it.

So why did I even try? Just writing it down makes it read like a bad idea, why spend 4 months on this when everything else was already pretty challenging?

Turns out, the answer is pretty simple.

I didn’t want to make my FIRST game

There’s a gamedev cliché that is really true, and it happens a lot. It’s about the 12-year-old who wants to make a multiplayer MMO all alone as their first game, and, of course, it never gets done.

Well, trying to pack six different minigames into my first game was my MMO. It took me a while to accept CATCHING FISHES for what it was: a simple, 5-minute game about taking a bath when you’re very tired.

In part, it’s like that because that’s the idea that I fished, and it was an honor bringing it to life. But it’s also because, well, that’s what I could deliver.

I kept wanting it to be more and more, and maybe on some level, I just wanted myself to be more. I wanted to be able to create fully fledged minigames, additional animated characters (the cat!), cutscenes for every interaction, but… I can’t. Not yet.

Because, you see, CATCHING FISHES is my first game. And that means something.

It means it’s the start of my journey. I’m still learning! Ideas are beautiful, unique, and limitless beings. But they are tied to our skills and efforts. And no matter how much energy and willingness I put into it, some things are still out of reach.

Accepting this was, ultimately, what made me get this game done. It took me a while, it certainly could have taken less, but it also could have taken more.

I could still be trying to craft a perfect game, with lots of animation, mechanics, and content. Instead, I made a short and simple game.

But it’s done. It’s out there! I can finally relax!

And take a well-deserved bath.

This post took me ~05 hours to write! I use ProcrastiTracker to track my time.

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!VERY VERY ULTRA SECRET AND EXCLUSIVE VIDEO OF A CATCHING FISHES MINIGAME FEATURING MY CAT: NELSINHO!