Protokol-Ø: What I Learned Making My First Game

After Unutma, I wanted to try something I had never done: make a game. Not a big one. Something I could actually finish, with a story I cared about. That became PROTOKOL-Ø, my first game experiment: an AI thriller story game.

The idea

I've always been drawn to thrillers about systems: a bureaucracy, a protocol, a machine that quietly decides things about people. I wanted a game where you sit inside one of those systems and feel the weight of each small decision.

So Protokol-Ø is an AI thriller told through cases. A case lands in front of you. You read it. Then you make a call: approve, reject or escalate. Then the next one comes. The story moves forward through what you decide, and your decisions matter — not in a "pick the red or blue ending" way, but in the slower way a pattern of choices starts to say something about you.

I won't say more about the plot. It's a thriller; the less you know going in, the better.

Why a decision-making game told through cases

I chose the case format partly because I love it and partly because I was honest with myself about my limits. I didn't know how to build 3D worlds yet. I didn't know how to animate characters. What I did know, from building Unutma, was how to make clean screens, store state and move data around.

A case-based story plays to those strengths. Each case is a screen. Each decision is state. The hard part becomes writing, pacing and consequence — things I could work on in the evenings without fighting an engine.

What my first game taught me

A game is not an app with a story attached. In an app, friction is the enemy; you remove every step you can. In a game, the right kind of friction is the game. Making the player hesitate before pressing "approve" was the whole point. I had to unlearn a lot of app instincts.

Writing is the slow part. I assumed the code would take longest. It didn't. Writing cases that felt real, that were ambiguous enough to make you think, and that connected to each other later took most of the time and most of the rewrites.

Consequence has to be visible. My first testers were mostly family. They made decisions and then shrugged. They couldn't feel that anything had changed. I went back and made the effects of earlier choices surface later in ways you could actually notice. Without that, "your decisions matter" is just a sentence on a store page.

Finishing is a skill. The hardest moment was deciding it was done. There was always one more case to add. At some point I had to accept that a finished small game is worth more than an unfinished bigger one.

How it's offered

Protokol-Ø is free to download and the first two modules are free. If you want to keep going, a single one-time purchase unlocks the rest of the story. There are no ads. That was a deliberate choice: a thriller falls apart when a video interrupts the moment you're deciding someone's fate. I'd rather the game stay quiet and let people support it if they want to.

Where it is now

Protokol-Ø has been on the App Store since April 2026. It's a small game, and I'm fine with that; it was my first, and it taught me the things I needed to know before NEO and everything after it. I still go back now and then to fix things and tighten the writing.

If you like thrillers where the hardest button to press is the one that says "approve," give it a try.