How I Built Dodge Rush

I've always been a video game enthusiast. I love playing games, but I've also always wanted to experience the other side: actually building one and sharing it with other people.

That's where Dodge Rush started.

I wanted to go back to the simplicity of older games, something you could understand almost immediately, pick up and play, but that would still give you a reason to come back and improve your score. At the same time, I wanted to combine that simplicity with some features players expect from modern mobile games: character customization, unlockable content, daily challenges, coins, achievements and social sharing.

I decided to build Dodge Rush as a solo developer, with AI acceleration helping me throughout the process, both for code generation and for creating some of the game's assets.

The first playable version came together surprisingly quickly. The core concept was simple: keep moving, avoid obstacles, survive as long as possible and try to beat your previous score.

But the hardest part wasn't actually making the game work.

It was making the first run challenging without being impossible.

I wanted a new player to feel that they could realistically get somewhere on their first attempt, while still feeling that there was room to improve. Finding that balance required a lot of iteration and roughly 25 releases during development and after launch.

One of the biggest technical challenges was the game's background.

Some of the backgrounds use transparency and layered assets. Everything looked fine in the browser, but once I started testing on actual mobile devices, some of those assets weren't rendering correctly. Getting the complete background to consistently display on mobile took quite a bit of debugging and optimization.

Today, some of the things I'm most proud of are the character shop and unlock system, the current difficulty balance, and the share card feature that lets players share their latest score.

The share card is actually one of my favorite recent additions. It turns a simple high score into something players can actually show to other people.

And that's really what Dodge Rush is about for me: taking a simple idea and continuously building on it without losing the simplicity that made the idea interesting in the first place.

It's been a fun journey so far... and it's only the beginning.