Trash Tower Zero is a physics-based puzzle game inspired by games like Cut The Rope, Where’s My Water, and World of Goo. It launched on the Google Play Store on June 1st, 2025.

It all started with a bad impression of Danny Devito. I did a 3-day solo game jam in 2020 called Trash Tower, where the main character was a Danny Devito inspired raccoon who needed to build the tallest tower. The initial prompt for the game jam was tower defense. To get out of having to make a tower defense game, I decided to defend Deeto’s honor via the tallest tower. Once announced, I disconnected from distractions and went to work on designing the game. After about 5 minutes, the participants argued that the prompt was a genre, not a theme, so it was changed to clones. Unfortunately, I had no idea until half a day through designing and prototyping. That’s how Deeto’s perfect clone made it into the story.

Development for the game didn’t start until October of 2024. I had a game industry job and was living my best life when the layoff nation attacked. After four months of full-time sending applications to jobs, I realized the job market was so bad for programmers in and out of the game industry that it made more sense to follow my dreams.

Design

I already had a starting prototype, but the game mechanics were completely different and not built for mobile. With this project, I tried my best to make a commercially viable product while maintaining the charm of its goofy origins. Part of that was rewinding the clock so that Deeto could be younger and likable as a character. Initial designs were more heavily Kamina based and a little Marty Mcfly. Our Character designer, Rachel Brett, did a great job steering Deeto to what he is today!

Game Design wise, I wanted to make this appropriate for a mobile game and looked to games I used to like to play as a kid, such as Cut the Rope, Where’s My Water, and World of Goo. It turns out that designing 100 levels that are interesting is difficult. Around the 50-level mark, I had a mini breakdown that I was only halfway through. Around World 7, I started having fun designing again with the bouncing tire mechanic.

Business professionals would scoff at my monetization strategy. I wanted to rewind the clock to a simpler time. I understand that time gating, full-screen ads, notifications, and other tactics are normalized now, but I just wanted to build something that people could enjoy and own, like in the old days. If you buy the game, you can play it offline. People don’t have money for $80-90 games, so at the very least, you can play the game for free with minimal banner ads like an old browser flash game. Because I don’t have inflated CEO and manager costs like AAA, the game doesn’t need to reach millions of players before seeing a profit. I am cutting out as much of the middleman as possible.

Project Management

I held four concepts dear to me during development.

Time

Given that my layoff in 2024 happened on my birthday weekend, I wanted to overwrite that by launching my own game in 2025. I made it my goal to get something out in 8 months. Although initially, I thought the game would be done in 3 months. I was wrong! I underestimated how long it would take to hire people in various fields of expertise. Just counting my time alone, I spent 805 hours getting the game to launch on June 1st, 2025. Marketing took up the lion’s share of my time with the convention circuit I ran with the Society of Play.

Budget

Being laid off, I didn’t have much savings to pay rent AND hire many people. I did as much of the work as I could without compromising quality. When I did hire, I tried to pay fairly and be as explicit in my specifications in a commission-based contract as possible.

Scope

Developing ideas to improve the game is easy, but shaving off features to meet a deadline and budget is very difficult. Having a rigorous vision for the game was paramount to prioritizing scope. It balances giving quality of life features and being in development hell. I cut a lot of features to get the Android build published on time. Maybe later, I can deliver a patch with some of the features cut. Another boon was getting the game in front of people at conventions and observing how they interacted with the game.

Knowing You and Your Team’s Limits

Every project has unavoidably new technologies or techniques, but the solutions I delivered were always within the team’s capabilities. If it was something I could not do and couldn’t find someone to do it in a satisfactory, timely manner, the feature was cut.

Development Pipeline

I have been programming professionally for 12 years and have been the tech lead on many projects from start to finish. So, I followed a standard development pipeline. I prototyped the whole game, built a vertical slice, which I turned into a demo, built a minimum viable product, and skipped the alpha phase as what I had built was already close to my vision, which I tested with a closed group in beta, then utilizing all the feedback I got and observed via my convention runs, devised the Gold version I would go live with.

Closing Thoughts

During development, I realized that this could very well have been my dream job if, financially speaking, it was guaranteed to net a return on time spent. Because of that uncertainty, it was 8 months of anxiety-inducing self-doubt. But regardless of how I felt, I had the discipline to get up each day and work on it. Whether the game does well financially or not, I launched a commercial game and am proud of myself for it. However, it would be nice if I at least broke even.