HOUSE DUCK · AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION
The reason why I suddenly started developing after coming all the way to Germany
I am from the Department of Industrial Design at Kyonggi University, class of 17.
Now, I have established a sole proprietorship in Germany,
and I am trying to create and release various software including games myself.
My very first game, Quirky Ball is practically finished in development,
and I have reached the stage of business registration and payment testing for both major markets.
But the funny thing is,
I originally had no intention of becoming a developer, nor did I think of making games myself.
Looking back, everything I did in my life was just connected to this point.
My environment changed frequently from a young age
My environment changed quite frequently since my childhood.
Because of that, naturally,
it was not easy to build deep relationships in one place for a long time.
To put it nicely, I got used to adapting to new environments,
and to put it bluntly, I think I learned a bit early how to survive anywhere on my own.
That doesn't mean I had
huge goals since I was little.
University was neither great nor bad,
I drew some pictures, managed my school records, and entered the Department of Industrial Design at Kyonggi University.
Until then,
that I would come to Germany someday to make games myself,
register a business, and think of selling software,
I never expected at all.
The first thought I had while watching Bitcoin as a college student
Around the 1 year of college,
there was a time when Bitcoin began to receive major attention.
It is not that I made money with Bitcoin at that time.
Rather, what I felt while seeing that was something else.
No matter how pessimistic the world looks,
and even if I do not have much,
if I watch closely and am prepared for moments when the times change drastically,
the existing starting line itself might lose much of its meaning.
I think I had that thought for the first time then.
Someone might be rich from the beginning,
someone might start in a good environment,
and someone might have much better conditions than I do.
However, at moments when the times change significantly,
something that everyone encounters for the first time is created.
If I am prepared then,
I thought an opportunity might arise for me as well.
This thought stayed in my head for quite a long time.
And then I went to the military
Then I went to the military.
After finishing my military service and being discharged,
COVID had broken out this time.
The world changed completely once again.
Lockdowns were implemented,
people could not go outside,
and everything began to run differently than before.
Naturally, it was an anxious time.
Yet strangely, at that time,
"The world is changing so drastically, wouldn't there be some opportunity here too?"
I had that thought.
Perhaps it was because I had already had a similar thought once before.
So from then on, I lived with the mindset of trying whatever I could to the maximum extent.
I even made a board game with schoolmates I used to enjoy games with
I originally liked games like Overwatch very much.
I liked the game itself,
but I think I liked playing games while talking with people even more.
Since we shared the commonality of being from the same school,
we somehow ended up even making a board game together.
And we actually proceeded with crowdfunding.
Surprisingly, the crowdfunding succeeded.
Looking back now, this was also quite an important experience.
Loving games,
actually planning and making a product,
showing it to people,
and selling it for money were completely different matters.
However, at the time, I did not particularly think that experience would be used anywhere later.
I just did it because it was fun.
That board game led to getting a job at a gaming company
However, that experience became my resume just as it was.
The experience of loving games,
trying to make games myself,
and even attempting crowdfunding
seemed to look somewhat interesting from the perspective of a gaming company.
I was also lucky.
That is how I got a job in the gaming industry.
At first, it was QA.
Starting with N Company, I worked at companies of quite diverse sizes, ranging from mid-sized businesses to startups.
My actual career experience itself was not very long, about 3 years.
However, in that short amount of time,
I experienced multiple companies and diverse environments.
There were organizations with many people,
places where people were lacking,
places where job roles were sharply divided,
and places that could only function if a single person handled multiple tasks at once.
For someone like me whose childhood environment kept changing,
this felt less like a burden and more like playing an interesting roguelike game. And furthermore, changing jobs brought higher salaries, new colleagues, and new tasks.
At first, I truly only did testing.
When I first started doing QA,
it was literally centered around black-box testing.
If there was a planning document, I would look at the document,
when a feature was implemented, I would check if it matched the specification,
and if there was a problem, I would log a bug.
Ultimately, the foundation of the QA role is verification.
It was not about changing the game in the direction I wanted,
but rather checking as thoroughly as possible whether the given specifications were properly implemented.
So at the time,
"I should make a game myself."
I never even thought about that.
While there were opportunities to talk about improvement proposals,
QA ultimately did not have the power to decide the direction of the game itself.
My job was to catch as many problems as possible within my assigned area.
However, as I moved to different companies, I ended up handling more things.
As my experience accumulated
and I changed companies, the situation changed little by little.
Particularly in environments like startups,
a single person cannot just do one thing.
There is a shortage of people, so what can you do?
If you do not do it, the game does not come out.
And people pressure you.
You cannot go home.
Ultimately, you have to do it.
So I started touching engines,
looking at data tables,
checking logs,
and understanding the development process.
Because I had to perform more tests within the timeframe,
I had no choice but to directly touch various things to increase efficiency.
A poorly scribbled planning document by someone who is not a planner,
and software roughly developed based on that specification,
I had to verify everything from start to finish.
Builds were done 1 to 2 times every 1 week...
It is more accurate to view it as having learned it to survive.
Having a major in industrial design also secretly helped here.
When looking at interfaces,
evaluating what workflows users might find inconvenient,
or discussing design-related problems, my major knowledge popped up quite often.
Later on, rather than just being someone who tests,
I think I grew closer to a development QA who could handle various problems alone
while understanding everything from planning to development and design to a certain extent.
As I launched multiple games, a sense of responsibility also developed.
While working in QA,
I experienced the launch process of several games.
Countless tests are conducted before launch.
I create test cases,
look into exception cases,
and continuously check if there are any issues.
Yet, no matter how hard I try, after launch,
there are times when bugs that I failed to discover pop up.
Every time that happened, I reflected on myself quite a bit.
"Why did I not see this?"
"Could I have found it if I had tested just a little differently?"
As such experiences accumulated, my sense of responsibility grew quite strong.
Doing QA for a long time does not make you feel like you know a lot;
rather, it seems to make you realize how many things you can miss.
Those experiences are currently playing a huge role even when I develop now.
That does not mean I intended to make games back then either.
To say it again,
I did not want to become a developer at that time either.
I had no goal of making games directly
and starting my own company.
Instead, while watching various people
within the company, I had many thoughts.
Being in a high position did not mean they always made good judgments,
and being in the industry for a long time did not mean they did not make mistakes at crucial moments.
Conversely,
Even games that personally seemed somewhat lacking
sometimes generated much better sales in the market than expected.
At the time, I just
"Guess this industry is just like this."
and let it go.
It did not lead to the thought of trying it myself.
That thought changed after I came to Germany.
The idea of living abroad had always been in a corner of my mind.
I was born in 98.
While working in South Korea,
I kept having one question.
Will I be able to continue economic activities by working hard like now in the future
while covering housing,
living expenses,
old age,
and even pensions?
Inflation was progressing very rapidly,
and even if salaries went up, life did not feel noticeably much more relaxed.
That did not mean I thought I had to leave the country right away.
It is probably more accurate to say that the option of living abroad was sealed away in a corner of my heart.
Then an opportunity to go to Germany arose.
With my then-girlfriend, now my wife,
we meticulously planned our emigration abroad for about half a year.
I was working a job in South Korea at the time.
Even conversion to a regular employee position had been confirmed at the company.
However, the company's financial situation suddenly worsened drastically.
Eventually, the time came for me to resign as well.
And quite strangely,
about 2 weeks before my resignation,
my wife passed the final interview as a developer at a German company.
As a result, I resigned with a smile.
Timing in life is truly strange.
In 2025,
we got married and moved over to Germany.
I thought that once I came to Germany, I would learn German and do QA.
The initial plan was simple.
Learn German,
and I thought I could just do game QA again in Germany.
However, when I looked up job postings,
there were many places for game QA that only required English.
"Huh? Then do I really need to be this good at German?"
I wondered, but
still, if I were going to live in Germany, I felt I should learn German.
So I continued to learn German.
Along the way, I also looked into Germany's vocational training system,
and explored various other career paths.
I even checked if there were areas in the German military that foreigners who are not regular soldiers could participate in.
I really looked into all sorts of things.
Anyway, at the time, I didn't even know for sure what I would do in the future.
German was fun, but reality was different.
Studying German itself was quite fun.
My proficiency improved a lot too.
I think I gained quite a bit of confidence up to the intermediate level.
However, the higher the advanced level went, the more clearly I felt a wall.
The language learned in language school
and the language actually used in reality were different.
Above all, unless it is your native language, studying a foreign language has no end.
Of course, if you keep studying, you can do better.
The problem was that I could not just sit in a language school for the rest of my life.
Every aspect of daily life was slow.
Administration was slow,
handling tasks was slow,
and getting around was quite difficult until I bought a car.
Just because I was of Asian descent,
unpleasant incidents happened about once a month.
At first, adapting to each and every such experience was not easy.
Now I have reached a point where I can laugh off most things, though.
Conversely, there were things that could only be felt in Germany.
The air was clean,
and there was a unique emotional leisure different from South Korea.
It seemed that the leisure coming from the country's economic size
itself played a certain role.
There were good points,
and inconvenient points,
and I spent about 1 years like that.
Then I encountered vibe coding.
While pondering various career paths
after coming to Germany, I happened to encounter vibe coding.
It was a method of writing code using AI
and building software directly.
There must be many people who dislike AI.
Especially in the development industry, it is also a very controversial issue.
However, in my life, it was difficult
to think of this as a crisis.
Rather, it looked like yet another opportunity.
It felt similar to what I felt when I saw Bitcoin during my 1 year in college.
It felt like a moment when the era was changing drastically once again.
Just because AI exists doesn't mean anyone can make good software.
Right now, anyone can use AI to
write code to some extent.
It will become even easier in the future.
Even so, I don't think anyone can make good software.
Because writing a single line of code and
planning a product,
developing it,
testing it,
releasing it,
and operating it are completely different stories.
I have already experienced this process
several times at a game company.
I majored in design,
did game QA,
handled engines, tables, and logs,
and actually released multiple games.
I've worked at large companies,
mid-sized companies,
and experienced startups too.
I also saw how development processes differ from company to company.
Above all, I saw firsthand what happens when issues blow up after a release.
This kind of experience is not something AI can create on your behalf.
Rather, AI lowered the barriers tremendously
that were needed to turn the experience I've built up into an actual product.
I felt quite a lot of potential in that regard.
Even my wife is a developer.
Currently, my wife works as a full-stack developer.
So it is also an environment where we can talk about technical things while developing.
Yet the funny thing is, perhaps because I majored in industrial design
and did game QA for a long time,
I tend to be very sensitive to interface or usability issues.
Sometimes, even more than my wife who is a current developer,
over a single button,
a single margin,
or a single user flow,
there are times when I act much more sensitively.
Ultimately, I think this is also a difference in the experience I have accumulated so far.
Looking back at my life, everything was strangely connected.
While spending about 1 years in Germany, I looked back at my life quite a lot.
Industrial design.
Games.
Board game production.
Funding.
Game QA.
Company N.
Mid-sized company.
Startup.
Planning.
Design.
Engine.
Data table.
Log.
Game release.
Blog.
Emigrating abroad.
German language.
German administration.
Seen one by one, they seem to have little to do with each other.
However,
"Create software alone, release it directly, and operate it."
If you put it under that single goal, strangely enough, every single one of them was useful.
So at some point, this thought crossed my mind.
Shouldn't I try making one myself too?
I didn't have to wait until things became perfect.
There is one thing I felt while living company life.
Just because someone has worked for a long time
doesn't mean they always make the right decisions.
Having a high rank doesn't mean they don't make mistakes either.
And even games that seemed a bit lacking to me
made plenty of money in the market.
Seeing that, my perspective changed for the first time after coming to Germany.
It was that there was no reason for me to wait until I finished all preparations completely.
After all, games are made by people too.
Software is made by people too.
So, could I try doing it myself?
That is why I turned on Godot.
I installed the free Godot engine like that
and started making a game myself.
At first, I just wanted to see how far I could go.
However, the speed was faster than I thought.
After about 3 weeks passed, the game reached a fairly plausible level of completion.
Even when comparing the development speed and quality with the games I released at my past company,
"At this rate, I could really service this!"
An outcome that made me think that came out.
At that moment, I gained conviction.
That there was no need to end this as just a study project.
That I should actually release it.
First game, Quirky Ball
The name of the first game was decided Quirky Ball as that.
It is a puzzle game.
Currently, the actual game development itself is almost finished,
and I am continuously carrying out improvement work.
I also finished sole proprietorship registration in Germany.
Currently, for the release on Google Play and App Store,
various paperwork and payment testing are underway.
When I started development, I would not have thought I would get this far this fast.
However, there are also many things to be desired from the very first game.
There are things I felt while making my first game.
First of all, I am not someone who plays puzzle games that much originally.
While making it myself, I felt a lot of the limitations the genre itself has.
The fact that I completed a game, and
whether that game is a game I want to keep making in the future were another issue.
So I plan to change the direction a bit moving forward.
I will reflect my tastes more,
and try to make things while analyzing more of what people actually want.
I do not plan to only make games either.
House Duck is not intended to be used as a name solely for making games.
It is a sole proprietorship trade name, and
it is closer to a name that groups together various software I will make in the future.
I plan to make games,
make apps,
and make web services.
I want to solve problems I personally experienced as inconvenience in life through software as well.
Games must create fun.
On the other hand, problems in daily life already have the inconvenience itself present.
If you properly solve that inconvenience,
I think that in itself can become a product.
Therefore, from now on, not only large and small games,
I plan to keep making software that I actually need and create.
I intend to leave all of that process on this blog.
On this blog, I plan to record
the process I experience while developing myself from now on.
I will write game development diaries,
and I will write software development diaries.
I plan to leave behind the process of actually releasing games on Google Play and App Store.
The process of creating a sole proprietorship in Germany will be the same.
Features that failed during development,
ideas that were discarded due to misjudgment,
I plan to record all of it.
And when the game is released, I will also disclose the number of downloads,
and if possible, I plan to disclose revenue with actual numbers.
If it goes well, I will write it as it goes well,
and if it ruins, I intend to write it as it ruins.
I do not plan to make a blog that collects only successful results and pretends to be successful.
In the first place, I have not succeeded yet either.
Even the first game is still before release.
However, I am already producing 2 upcoming works and other services.
There was no useless experience
Among the experiences I have had living up to now,
there were countless things that did not immediately turn into money.
Studying industrial design was like that,
and making board games was like that.
Moving around various game companies was like that,
and the time spent learning German was like that.
The time experiencing trial and error after coming to Germany is the same.
There were many things back then where I wondered why I even had to go through such experiences.
However, looking back now, those experiences had all piled up like data.
And at some point, those pieces of data started connecting into one.
It is not much different from the thoughts I had while looking at Bitcoin during my 1 year of university.
No matter how difficult the times may feel,
I believe that for someone who is prepared, the experiences of having lived diligently up until now can at some point culminate into a single opportunity.
I am not yet someone who has achieved economic success with this.
Therefore, this writing is not a success story either.
Rather, it is a story that is starting from now.
However, I believe in one thing.
There was no such thing as a useless experience.
That is why I plan to live that way moving forward as well.
Keep creating,
keep failing,
keep learning,
and eventually connect those experiences into revenue.
That is what I think the philosophy of House Duck is.