Starting My First Mobile Game: Fat, Dead, & in a Dungeon
Most of what I write about here is automation: pipelines, agents, and tools that take repetitive work off people's plates.
This post is about something different.
Brew Bytes is building its first mobile game.
It is called Fat, Dead, & in a Dungeon, and you can follow it on its product page.
The Premise
A middle-aged office worker dies at his desk after years of overwork. His last keystroke never finishes.
Instead of rest, a Dark God intercepts his soul, finds the whole thing funny, and drops him into a collapsing dungeon with one instruction: descend or be erased.
The dungeon builds itself out of his memories. Floors are departments. Enemies are coworkers, managers, policies, and office machines that never worked. Upgrades arrive as Performance Reviews. The only weapon he gets is the keyboard he died on, and every time he throws it, another one appears.
Why an Office Afterlife
I have spent a long time in corporate environments, first in client services and then as a software engineer. Everyone who has worked in one knows the feeling of a department that runs on policy instead of sense.
That felt like better material for a dungeon than another cave full of goblins.
The rule I keep coming back to is that every part of the game has to come from that premise. Generic fantasy can show up, but only after it has been translated through the office. Magic looks like corrupted paperwork, red tape, and black toner. The humor aims at institutions and management, never at the worker.
That includes the title. He is a heavyset guy in a rumpled shirt and loosened tie, and he stays that way. Getting stronger does not make him thinner or more heroic. His death is about being worked into the ground, not about his body.
What a Run Looks Like
The game is played in portrait with one thumb. You move, and your weapons fire automatically in the direction you are moving.
A full run is planned at about 12–18 minutes across five departments:
- Orientation teaches the basics fast.
- Three middle departments rotate each run, drawn from Mail Room, Operations, Human Resources, Call Center, and IT.
- Executive Management ends the run with a boss fight.
The hook is that each floor is being deleted while you are on it. Enemies drop Overtime, and Overtime earns Performance Reviews. Every floor asks the same question: stay and grab one more upgrade, or run for the elevator before the department disappears with you in it.
Death ends the run. No checkpoints. You keep progress toward long-term unlocks and clock in again.
Builds That Misbehave
I would rather have a few interactions that feel great than a big pile of weapons that all do the same thing.
The first three build styles:
- Burnout Cascade: damage that spreads from enemy to enemy as they go down.
- Red Tape Dash: your dash lays down tape that roots enemies while orbiting stationery shreds them.
- Delegation Department: copies of yourself that fight for you.
A build should look and play differently by the end of a run, not just hit harder.
Testing on Real Hardware
Mobile games lie to you in the editor. Text that looks fine on a monitor is unreadable at arm's length, and touch controls that feel fine with a mouse fall apart under a thumb.
So the build gets exported as an Android debug APK and installed on a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite running Android 14. The screenshots in this post and on the product page (other than the menu) come from that tablet.
That testing has already paid off. The character art gets checked at real size before it is approved, and there is an open issue because new players do not yet understand what is happening in the first minute. The game currently explains its premise worse than this blog post does. That is next on the list.
Where It Stands
To be clear about status:
- This is my first mobile game.
- It is in development.
- It is not on any app store yet.
Today there is a playable three-department version with the worker, keyboard combat, collapsing floors, and Performance Review upgrades. The next step is getting that version in front of outside players and making it fun before building out the full five-department run.
The plan is a free, complete introductory run with a one-time purchase to unlock the full game. There is no price yet.
It is built with Godot 4.
Follow Along
Like everything else at Brew Bytes, this will be built in public. Dev notes will show up on the game's page as I post them.
If you want to playtest or have questions, reach out on the Contact page.