Hey folks,

I’m Alper. I currently live in Turkey, and I’ve been unemployed for the last 7-8 months. For a long time, I worked as an operations and QA specialist for web infrastructures. I’m not a software engineer, but my career kept me deeply involved with software development.

With the economic conditions getting extremely tough here, I found myself out of work with a lot of time to think about what I could actually do to survive. I’ve always loved video games and constantly had ideas of my own. Seeing where AI technology is today, I realized I might actually be able to bring those ideas to life. So, I rolled up my sleeves.

After several prototypes, I’ve finally brought one of my games to a releasable state. My demo is launching next week on Steam.

Now, I know a lot of gamers are strongly against "AI-slop" games, and for very good reasons. I completely agree with the criticisms, especially regarding the artistic side of things. That’s exactly why I stayed as far away as possible from taking the easy route of using AI to generate art.

My game is essentially a text-based, terminal-style tycoon game. It’s a stock market simulation where I’ve tried to blend in some survival and roguelite dynamics. There are almost zero visual assets; the entire system is code-based. Aside from a few minimalist house and car graphics, everything you see is generated through code. On top of the core trading system, I’ve added side gigs and hidden underground mechanics like market manipulation, cyber-attacks, and corporate investigations.

My immediate goal and dream is simply to prove to myself that I can do this, and honestly, to hold on. Right now, I really don't have any other options. My ultimate dream is to one day gather a few talented designers and devs to form a sweet little indie studio. But I know I first need to prove myself and have concrete products to show.

I developed this game entirely through "vibe coding". In a way, I just applied my professional QA/Ops background to game dev: I designed the development pipeline, asked my "developer" (Claude) to write the code, and then I acted as the QA. I tested it, gave feedback, had it fixed, and iterated.

I didn't just type "make me a game" into a prompt and hit enter. I spent 3 months meticulously working on this squashing bugs, optimizing mechanics, and tweaking the UI to the best of my ability.

At the end of the day, I think I’ve created something that fans of this niche will genuinely enjoy playing. Of course, this is my first commercial game, and I'm not expecting life-changing financial success. I know there's a huge chance very few people will even see it or play it, because marketing is way harder than game dev. It's a completely different beast. Still, with a $0 budget, I managed to gather 140 wishlists in 2 months. To me, that alone is a massive success.

Game: Neo Capitalist - Stock Market Survival Simulator

Demo Release: June 8 (Next Week)

Steam Next Fest: June 15

Full Release Plan: Early July

I don't plan on abandoning the game after release. I have plenty of ideas I want to add via patches or maybe free content updates.

About 15 years ago in college, I designed a physical card game to play with my friends, and we had an absolute blast. My real passion project is turning that into a digital PC game (I actually have a working prototype of it now). But to do that justice, especially on the art and design side, requires a lot of work. That’s why I started with Neo Capitalist to build a proper foundation first.

Sorry for the long post, I just really needed to get this off my chest and share my process. Much love and respect to anyone who read this far.

My Steam Page (Wishlists mean the world to me right now): [https://store.steampowered.com/app/4580690/Neo\_Capitalist\_\_Stock\_Market\_Survival\_Simulator/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4580690/Neo_Capitalist__Stock_Market_Survival_Simulator/)

I’ve been unemployed for 8 months. To keep myself going, I built a terminal-based stock market survival game with a $0 budget. Here is my journey.