I’m thrilled to announce the release of Zen Rage on Steam 🎮 🚀
This marks a significant milestone in my journey as a game developer, and while Zen Rage is more of a stress-toy than a full-fledged game, I’m still incredibly proud of what I’ve learned and accomplished along the way.
Creating this project was a fantastic learning experience, especially working with Pygame — a cute, flexible, beginner-friendly framework written in Python. However, I quickly discovered that it’s not an industry-ready solution for game development and deployment.
While working with Python for game development, I realized there’s a noticeable lack of robust build and deployment tools for the language. Both Nuitka and PyInstaller feel, to say the least, a bit clumsy in their current state. I ultimately chose PyInstaller and had an okay experience with it, but there’s definitely more to be desired. It got the job done, but the process wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped, especially when targeting different platforms. Navigating these challenges has been invaluable, teaching me a lot about the realities of game development pipelines.
One of the biggest challenges was building many systems from scratch. I had to develop a scene manager, integrate custom shaders and Steamworks, and create a full UI system — everything from basic components like buttons and layout flows to more complex structures like containers and responsive layouts. On top of that, I built a text rendering system (handling word-breaking, inline elements, links, etc.), cut-scenes, easing functions, particle systems, internationalization, an animation system, texture atlases, and even a display list hierarchy. None of that came out of the box with Pygame, so I had to build it all from scratch.
It was an intense but rewarding process, and these custom solutions were essential to making Zen Rage what it is.
This release is just the beginning, and I’m excited to continue growing, improving, and creating. Thanks to everyone who supported me on this journey — I can’t wait to see what’s next!
If you’d like to check it out, you can find Zen Rage on Steam here
If you want to check the presskit for Zen Rage, you can find it here
