Kyle Staves: Game Developer

Author: Kyle

  • The Trouble with Psychosis

    It’s difficult to see a path forward for yourself when the vision of your future you see while psychotic always seems to make more sense than the ones you see when in your right state of mind.

  • Feeling Lost

    I think I see a path forward, but I’m lost at the moment. I had a wonderful day last night until medication management issues and money issues came up at unexpected time. I’m very grateful that medication management came up, the new OCD med dose (doubled from previous) gifted me a significantly improved night of sleep – but I woke up depressed and I was not expecting that.

    I’m on social security disability, so trying to “work” is very difficult. I think for now I’m just going to stream WoW once the servers come back up and try to find people to connect with there. I didn’t realize you could build a large following and simply not accept affiliation, so I can grow without risking my disability (which I require to keep a handle on my financial situation and the pressures of a recent purchase).

    I have hope, I’m just depressed again and didn’t see that in my future for today.

  • Building a Life Worth Living

    I sit here on this damp September afternoon as I settle into the new life I’ve built for myself. There hasn’t been much time to work on development tasks; with Summer coming to an end my wife and I had a pretty significant list of things we needed to accomplish before she returned to work as a teacher.

    Two things kind of happened at the same time. We decided to reclaim the space available to us in our home, and we decided we needed a new family vehicle (and a daily driver for me, I haven’t had my own vehicle in years). We got an 18 yard dumpster delivered to the driveway and filled it with all of the things that no longer fit in our life. Previous to this we had two rooms in the house available to us, a larger room (our bedroom) and a smaller room (our office).

    The office housed two desktop computers where we used to play games, but it’s been years since we used them so the room slowly devolved into a collection of boxes and other junk becoming essentially unusable in the process. Our bedroom had some space, but it was largely full – we had a TV on her dresser where we played our games (one of us on the TV, the other streaming PC games via Moonlight) and watched our content.

    New rooms, new us. We gutted both rooms, turned the smaller room into our bedroom with no TV – just a bed, a speaker for music/rain sounds, a mens dresser that we split, and our nightstands. The larger room we turned into a proper living room setup for ourselves. We now have two televisions, one for each of us to game on, both with a PS5, Switch 2, and our MacBook Pro’s hooked up for World of Warcraft (and so they’re finally always plugged in, charged, and ready to be used as actual laptops instead of dead in a drawer needing to be plugged in every time we use them).

    On the vehicle front we decided a truck made the most sense for us. We now have a Ford F150 hybrid that we can use to fuel our new life together. At first our inclination was to purchase a camper to tow next summer, which was a large factor in going with a truck, but now we are leaning toward tent camping for the next few years and using the money we save on a camper to do some actual travel. I really, really enjoy having my own vehicle again for when my wife is at work.

    Back to development soon, but I’m not sure if it’ll be on Kyle Incremental or if it will be on something a little less personal. I’m still trying to figure that out. I really want to work on Kyle Incremental, but I’m worried that by its very nature it may be sharing too much of myself with the world.

  • Good Morning

    As I sit here drinking my coffee this morning I’m left wondering how to talk to my therapist. I’ve been with the same therapist for around six or seven years at this point, and while we have a great relationship – we often find ourselves talking in circles about world news or my weekly checklist of “showering often enough is a huge win” and “going to the store by yourself is a huge win.” We don’t talk much about the greater picture of what I want out of life and how to achieve that.

    I want to change that this week. I meet with her in a half an hour and plan to update her on everything that has been happening with my wife and I over the last couple of months. We had been trying for a baby. We are no longer doing that. It’s kind of a major shake up in terms of what we are planning for our life together. I’m nervous, because it’s a strange conversation – but ultimately I’m hopeful that a new direction in life (and, frankly, the lifted stress of needing to build a life that I’d be proud to raise a child in) will give us more productive things to talk about.

    My therapist has always been hesitant about anything that looks like myself “going back to work.” Her and I disagree heavily on what “productive living” really looks like some times. “Work” is added stress and an increased risk of mania/psychosis in her eyes. In my eyes, some sort of productive work is an essential part of feeling like an adult, and navigating life on Earth in the year of our lord 2025.

  • Recent Trends

    I haven’t worked in years, so what have I been up to you might be wondering. I have mostly been a consumer, as awful as that sounds. I play video games while listening to podcasts and audio books, but I also enjoy a fair amount of video content as well – mostly improv groups.

    Shows

    1. Dropout: Really, anything they do is awesome. I don’t watch much of the D&D content, but the rest of the shows are delightful. Game Changer at the very least is a must watch.
    2. Smosh: I was super late to the train on Smosh. My wife and I only really got into them this past year after seeing some of the cast cross over on Dropout’s show Dirty Laundry. Smosh has been our go-to “I want to laugh with some low stakes” content, and Smosh vs. Christmas is absolutely on our yearly watch list now.

    Podcasts

    1. My Brother, My Brother, and Me: This has been my favorite podcast for years. The McElroy boys are just such a good vibe.
    2. Oologies: We recently hopped on this train and we’re very much enjoying it. My wife doesn’t listen to a ton of podcasts with me these days, but we are loving this one together.
    3. The No Sleep Podcast: If I could download the entire archive of only one podcast and keep it with my forever, this would be it. It’s a full production audio drama where a cast of very talented voice actors bring to life short stories, mostly in the horror genre.

    Games

    1. Diablo 4, Path of Exile 2, and Last Epoch: I’m lumping these all in together since they fill the same role on my day, I just rotate which I play. I grew up playing the original Diablo, then D2, and just kind of never left the genre. I find this to be by far the most podcast-friendly genre in terms of being fun to play, engaging, but not distracting me from the content of my podcast or audio book.
    2. World of Warcraft: Yup, we were here in the vanilla FilePlanet beta and we’re back again. We don’t play the way we used to (mostly sticking to things we can do together as a duo, as opposed to group content), and we don’t play nearly as much as we used to, but we’re around again poking our heads out from time to time exploring Azeroth. I even reconnected with an old friend today who plays, so that’s nice.
    3. Farm Together 2: My mother, my wife, and myself have all been playing the Farm Together franchise since the first game. I like that we all play it, and the second is a pretty big improvement over the first in terms of incremental game design in my opinion.
    4. Fantasy Life I: This is my wife’s current obsession. I love the game too, and my mother plays as well, but my wife is all in. Super cozy but far more engaging with lots of crafting and gathering minigames to keep you from falling asleep. Story is cute, my wife is finished with the story but I have a little to go on the final stretch.

    Anyway, it’s late and I’m tired. I’ll recommend some more stuff soon and likely create some individual posts specific to one thing to really dive into what we love about it.

  • Kyle Incremental Day 1

    Today was an interesting day. I started by watching the OpenAI keynote on the new ChatGPT 5 version rolling out soon (it’s 1:56 AM now and I still don’t have access, but that’s okay). That got me pretty excited to get my feet wet, so I set up my development environment and started the project.

    1. Installed iOS 26 / MacOS 26 beta on my iPhone, MacBook, iPad, and Apple Watch.
    2. Created Kyle Incremental in Xcode and backed the project up to a private GitHub repository.
    3. Tested deploying the default project to all devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad) that I’m worried about for now.
    4. Added some basic save game functionality.
    5. Added iCloud integration utilizing SwiftData.
    6. Tested save data syncing across devices.
    7. Created an incredibly simple incremental game that rewards you for how many seconds you were offline to further test save syncing between the phone, tablet, and laptop.
    8. Generated a basic icon for the game with ChatGPT and added it to the project.

    Overall I feel like it was an incredibly productive first day. ChatGPT was wildly helpful with every step of this process, and the direct integration with Xcode has been pretty eye opening. Excited to see where this all takes me. Not sure I’ll get back to the project tomorrow or not, but I already have some ideas on what I want to do next. I may look into what tool are available currently for music generation, as I plan to use ChatGPT for now for images and help with the actual development/programming.

  • Here we go…

    So over the past year or so I’ve really felt a calling to return to some sort of programming work. Originally I thought about Unity, but decided it was too familiar and I’d bog myself down asking “is how I’m doing this out of date?” I also wanted to start with simpler projects that feel native to the devices I use in my daily life, so I’ve decided to work on some small iOS projects for now.

    The first project I’ve started is called “Kyle Incremental” and it’s primary purpose it to have a space where I can start tinkering with some ideas without the need for fancy graphics. I’ve got a basic story I want to tell as you explore your way through the game, and I’m going to wrap it in some incremental game design that I’ve been a fan of personally.

    The goal isn’t to make money with any of these projects. It is simply to ask the question “Can I still do this?” I also really want to see how far AI has progressed not just as a toy for generating pictures and video, but as a tool to help with application development. Today I started the project and I’m honestly stunned with how much I got done in a single day with zero experience in Swift, near zero experience with Xcode (I’ve only used it to deploy Unity games, which does all the work for you).

    Let’s see where this journey takes me. Hopefully some positive changes are on the horizon.