It started as a Flash class assignment in October 2006 — a small, point-and-click escape game called Super Sneaky Spy Guy. Someone uploaded it to Newgrounds. People played it. They asked when the next one was coming. That single moment of "wait, people are actually playing this?" turned into nearly two decades of building escape rooms, RPGs, tools, and worlds for a browser audience that just kept showing up. This is the long version.
Sitting at my desk in 2002, hunting for a unique handle that wasn't already taken. The word just came to me. It sounded right. Felt like mine. I've used it ever since — every game, every site, every project carries that name.
25 years old. Fifth year of college, working full-time, three kids and a wife. Made Super Sneaky Spy Guy: The Search for Uncle Willie's Gold for an Adobe Flash class assignment — my first real game. Posted it on Newgrounds because the professor suggested it.
View →Came back to Newgrounds a week after posting Super Sneaky Spy Guy and found people everywhere — playing it, talking about it on multiple portals. I was completely shocked. That was the moment everything changed. I knew right then I wanted to make more games. The hobbyist side-quest just became the path.
Super Sneaky Spy Guy 1 wasn't a one-off. Over the next year I cranked out roughly 10 sequels — Spy Guy 2, 3, 4, all the way up. The character became a recurring identity in the early Newgrounds days and proved the first hit wasn't luck.
View →While my full-time job paid about $400 a week, some days the AdSense earnings on the games topped $100 alone. With three kids and a wife at home, that felt enormous. First time browser games felt like real income — not a side hobby.
Needed a portal of my own to host the games I was making. Also had a class assignment to build a website in Adobe Flash class. Stitched both together into the first version of melting-mindz.com. It was rough — has been redesigned dozens of times since. Most variations are still preserved on the Wayback Machine.
View →Found FGL — a platform where sponsors bid on Flash games. Total game-changer for how I thought about distribution, monetization, and getting in front of real publishers. Up to that point it was just AdSense and Newgrounds; FGL opened the door to real licensing deals.
Built a fast-food simulation from my own years working in fast food. Cook the burgers, fry the chicken and fries, dress the sandwiches, pour the drinks, serve on a tray. Even had a working recipe book. Posted to FGL — within days, an exclusive license sold for $800 to a Turkish portal called Oyunlar1. The shock of that sale is one I still remember.
The Oyunlar1 buyer also owned Games2Girls.com (huge at the time) and Flonga. What started as one license turned into a six-year customer relationship. They kept buying — escape games, adventure games, time-management games, girl games. Steady, consistent, big income. From 2008 to 2014 they were the engine.
Long before Loregend, the meta-creator instinct was already there. Built tools inside Flash itself to ship faster. Built libraries of reusable objects — locks, doors, inventory pieces, puzzle frames — that could drop into any new game. Every escape room reused systems from the last one. The pattern of making tools to make games started here — it just wasn't its own product yet.
Quit the day job. From 2009 onward, games were the entire income. Three kids, a wife at home, and a career staked entirely on Flash games and AdSense. It worked. Ten straight years of full-time indie game development from a home office.
January 2013. Started with sitelocks for HoodaMath.com. They bought their first escape game and it did so well they began purchasing them weekly. That cadence has never stopped — 13+ years later, still making games for Hooda on a weekly basis. The most enduring customer relationship of my career.
View →After six years of weekly work and tens of thousands of dollars in licenses, a new program manager at Oyunlar1 (now Oy1.com) came in and ended the partnership. Tough moment — but by then the Hooda relationship was already strong, so the studio absorbed it and kept moving.
After Oyunlar1 ended, the income shifted from one big partnership to a portfolio: SnapBreak Games (MouseCity), playit-online.com, license deals with Addicting Games, Coolmath.com. One site I genuinely can't remember the name of bought 10 old games at $1000 each — and actually paid. Wasn't counting on it. Cash in the door from games I'd already made.
Flash was clearly dying. SnapBreak Games (owners of MouseCity.com) sponsored my first Unity game. The game never actually shipped — they dragged the project out indefinitely — but the doorway it opened was the whole point. I've been working in Unity ever since. Sometimes the failed project is the bridge to the next decade.
View →AdSense earnings collapsed from $1200+/month to $200 on a good month. Flash dying plus the ad market shifting hit at the same time. Sponsorships and licensing kept the studio alive through the transition. The easy AdSense decade was over — anything that survived from here on had to be earned a different way.
A loss in the family changed everything in 2019. My wife passed unexpectedly. I took a full-time job in programming and data analysis and stepped away from games for a while. Looking back, the pause was necessary. It made it absolutely clear that I love this work — not just for the income, but because creating is one of the best things I get to do. When I came back, I came back deliberately.
After roughly a year of programming and data analysis full-time, the pull back to game-making was undeniable. The break wasn't a detour — it was the thing that turned games from a default career into a chosen one. Came back with a clearer head, a sharper sense of why I make things, and a different relationship with the work. The next chapter started here.
The Asylum games have always been my fans' favorites. I kept making more, amping each one up, trying to make every new entry better than the last. Of all the games I've shipped across two decades, this is the recurring identity that landed hardest with players. The series fans named for me — not the other way around.
Urban Survival Escape Day 1 through 5. Sneaky's Ranch Day 1 through 5. Players loved the long-form serial format — return to a world, watch it evolve, see the story unfold across multiple games. The Day series became a signature of this era. Same world, deeper every time.
Hooda has stayed consistent through everything — Flash dying, the AdSense cliff, the personal loss, the return. Started January 2013 and the rhythm has never broken. Weekly delivery, 13+ years deep. The longest-running, most reliable customer relationship of my career.
View →The first 3D game was an unreleased Unity project. From there I made several small 3D escape games in Unity and sold a lot of licenses on them. The jump from 2D Flash/HTML5 escape rooms to fully 3D environments was a real technical leap — and it set the foundation for everything 3D that came after, including Sneaky3D and VirtualEscape.
I'd always wanted to make an escape-game maker. Spent years not building it because I couldn't figure out the right tool. Then it hit me — don't use an existing engine. Build it from scratch. That single decision unlocked everything. The moment I committed to that, Loregend became a real project. The constraint was the answer.
View →Newgrounds Daily Trophies are awarded for finishing 1st through 5th place on the daily leaderboard (not to be confused with medals). I have hundreds of them, accumulated across nearly two decades of posting. As far as I'm aware, more than anyone else on the site. Two decades of consistent shipping, one trophy at a time.
View →Astryke, Sneaky3D, Yaren, Loregend, VirtualEscape, VectorForge, Magic Button Studio, Training Maker, Big City Escapes — all running in parallel. Not by accident: after twenty years of sharpening the craft and the tooling, I can hold ten serious projects at once where I used to hold two. Ambition finally caught up with capability.
The single best moment of this era. After years of wanting to build an escape-game maker and finally committing to building it from scratch, I shipped my first fully playable game using Loregend — the editor I built. The dream of "a tool that makes the games I make" became real. Everything since 2006 led to this moment.
View →The current challenge isn't building — it's strategy. How do I make the most of these new tools? How do I get them in front of the world? Twenty years of shipping games taught me how to ship games. Shipping tools to other creators is a different game with a different playbook — and I'm in the middle of learning it. The hard moments now are about distribution, audience, and self-belief, not code.
Every project on the studio page started as one of these moments. Some were planned. Most weren't. The next one is being built right now.