Case Study

Project Overview

The Drug Name Emoji Game is a web-based, mobile-friendly rebus-style quiz designed to help pharmacy students (and practicing healthcare professionals) learn and reinforce common anti-infective drug names. Players see an emoji puzzle alongside blank letter tiles and must either tap the correct letter tile or type their guess within a 30-second timer. Each round allows an extra 10–20% of the letters in guesses and starts with three lives. Incorrect guesses or time-outs each cost one life. The game features 40 drug names, and players earn points based on letters revealed, remaining guesses, and time left, encouraging replay to improve scores.

This project was inspired by Dr. Timothy Gauthier’s original PDF “The Drug Name Emoji Game” on idstewardship.com. It was also inspired by my daughter Ari, a CPhT, who I thought would enjoy a digital version. After reaching out, Dr. Gauthier agreed to collaborate, and I built out the web/mobile version under Pixel Pilgrim Studios.

Problem Statement & Objectives

Problem: Traditional paper-based quizzes can feel static and fail to engage today’s learners. Objectives:

• Migrate from a static PDF printout to an interactive, web-based experience.
• Ensure mobile compatibility so students can practice anywhere.
• Retain educational rigor while enhancing engagement through gameplay mechanics.

Target Audience & Context

• Primary: Pharmacy students studying infectious-disease pharmacology.
• Secondary: Healthcare professionals seeking a quick, gamified review.
• Assumptions: Users are familiar with anti-infective drug names and have access to a smartphone, tablet, or computer with keyboard/mouse.

Role & Team Composition

Role: Sole developer & designer.

Assets:

• Art: licensed from Craftpix.net and openemoji.org.
• Audio: sourced & edited via itch.io assets, FL Studio, and Audacity.
• Testers: Sara Diaz and Ariel Moya.

Team Size: 3 contributors (myself + 2 testers) plus outsourced asset providers

Timeline & Milestones

• Start: April 20, 2025.
• Prototype Complete: April 26, 2025.
• Beta Version: May 3, 2025.
• Launch: May 5, 2025.

Total Effort: ~40 hours (weekends only)

Technology & Tools

• Engine & Language: Godot 4.4.1 with GDScript, using our in-house “Wayfarer Framework” (autoloads for state management, UI controls, etc.).
• Art Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop.
• Audio Tools: FL Studio, Audacity.
• Development IDE: Godot Editor, Jetbrains Rider for scripts.

Game Design & Mechanics

• Rebus Presentation: Emoji + blank tiles represent each drug name.
• Lives & Timer: 3 lives per session; 30 sec countdown per word.
• Guess Limits: Players may make guesses equal to 10–20% of the length of the drug name before losing a life.
• Scoring: Coins earned based on unused guesses and time remaining.
• In-Game Store: Spend coins on extra time, hints, or additional lives.

Architecture & Code Structure

• Framework Reuse: Leveraged existing autoloads (GameStateManager, GameUtils) from Wayfarer.
• Modularity: Functional composition of game logic and separate resource files for drug-name data and emojis.
• Maintainability: Clear scene hierarchy (levels, UI overlays) and reusable UI components (pause menu, dev console stubs).

Challenges & Solutions

No major blockers arose. Thanks to the Wayfarer Framework’s built-in timer management and our prior work on composable UI scenes, development remained smooth and on-schedule.

Testing, QA & Iteration

• Methods: Five rounds of playtests and structured feedback sessions with Sara D. and Ariel M.
• Key Iteration: Added a visible “tried letters” tile overlay so players could track past guesses.

Launch & Distribution

• Delivery: Web build published on itch.io and embed code supplied to idstewardship.com.
• Promotion: Shared link on Discord, Threads.net, and relevant Reddit communities.

Metrics & Outcomes

• First 24 hrs: 16 unique players, average session ~2 minutes.
• Next Steps: Integrate Google Analytics tracking for retention, replay rate, and engagement heatmaps.

User Feedback & Testimonials

“It’s hard but fun.” - Ariel M.

“I loved deciphering the emojis!” - Sara D.

Players appreciated the challenge and replayability, noting the rebus format kept sessions engaging.

Lessons Learned

• Modular Code Pays Off: Composition enabled rapid reuse of UI components and logic.
• Data-First Design: Choosing flexible data structures up front simplified emoji and drug-name loading.
• Interactive Polish Matters: Custom shaders and AnimationPlayer effects significantly boosted “fun factor.”

Future Roadmap

• Content Expansion: Add more drug names to broaden the learning scope.
• Mobile App: Package as native iOS/Android builds.
• Thematic Re-skins: Repurpose the framework for other subject areas (e.g., software tools, art history) by swapping data, UI skins, and audio.

Try tha game now:

I have been working on tooling for my indie game studio in the last few weeks. It is a framework with pre-built systems, components, specific coding conventions, best practices, a well-defined project structure, and custom tools to aid development. It has helped me get started making games quickly and easily.

In my excitement, I shared it with the world on Reddit and LinkedIn. My LinkedIn network has only a handful of game developers, most of whom paid no attention to my posts. However, on Reddit, the attention was primarily negative.

It was the first Reddit post I ever made that had more downvotes than upvotes, resulting in a 0-upvote post as of 20 hours.

It’s discouraging to put so much effort into something you hope will be helpful for others and find that most of the 6k views downvoted the project.

Funny enough, there were only eight comments, and most discussed the best license. I ended up releasing it under MIT and fully open-source for anyone to do what they want.

On Itch.io, the analytics were different. Two hundred sixty people found it from the home page under ‘new tools,’ and nine downloaded it. Hopefully they found it useful.

I made the tool for myself and found it saved me a lot of time with boilerplate. Other indie devs could use something like this as a starting point.

I had three games in development: UAP, SnackSwap, and Arcana. I’ve since ported all of my games to use my new framework, and it has been a much nicer development experience.

This submission isn’t the end of my attempts to contribute something open-source. I’ll keep building tools and sharing them. I’m satisfied if it has helped at least one developer publish their game.

You can check it out on Itch.io or Github

— UhhHehHeh

I started this journey on January 15th, full of motivation. I set out to make three different games, each in a different genre, to push myself creatively.

I wanted to learn, build, and actually release something cool.

I self-funded everything with some savings of around $2,000, mostly going to real artists for assets. I chose not to use AI art. I wanted the work to have a soul, and I wanted to support actual people.

But life hit. My Day job got intense. My personal life got busy. And just like that, all momentum stopped. I haven’t touched my games in weeks. The project money is gone, and without it, everything is on pause.

I’ve thought about making the assets myself using Aseprite and Photoshop. I mean, I’ve tried. But it’s hard to stay inspired when the mountain keeps growing.

I streamed a bit on Twitch, but my environment is too noisy, making streaming difficult. No one wants to watch a “no commentary” stream. I uploaded a few YouTube videos from a past game jam, but editing and maintaining a channel takes more time than I have.

I feel stuck in a loop. Too many ideas. Not enough time. And now I’m even starting to feel dread around something I love to do. That’s not a good sign, is it?

What I really need is a community of people who are in it for real. Folks who code, who finish things, who keep showing up.

Most of the Discord or itch.io communities I’ve joined feel like ghost towns. Lots of hype and little follow-through.

I don’t want to be that guy.

So now what? Maybe I’ll try to block time on a calendar. I’ll try to stay organized with my Obsidian vault and Toggl Timer.

I’m not quitting.

But if I’m being honest with myself, I’m tired, I’m stuck, and I’m not sure what the next right step is.

I’ll figure it out? One slow, uncertain step at a time, I guess.

If you’re on the same boat, or if you’re someone who’s stuck, too, feel free to reach out. Maybe we can build something together.

— UhhHehHeh

For anyone who has followed me on any of my other websites, you may recall that I’ve been teaching myself game development since about 2019

I had tried a handful of game engines and frameworks and I ultimately decided that I would use Godot and Phaser for my Indie Game Studio

For the games I’ve been working on, I’ve been working with Artists to create art work for me while I focus on the code.

One problem I ran into though was, I ran out of money real fast. The art work ranges from $120-$400 for sprites and game assets.

Being a self-funded indie game developer means it may be a few months or even a year or so before I can get disposable income that I can use for my projects. I decided I needed to do something to start getting some practice in.

What better way to practice than to join a game jam?

The Game Jam

I joined a few discord servers with game jam communities. One of these was Brackeys game jam server. I met three other game jam participants Aguren, C, and AdultSwaim.

We partnered up and anxiously awaited the theme to be announced.

After a few weeks the official game jam started and the theme was “Nothing can go wrong”.

Documenting my process

To keep track of my progress and evaulate how I was working, I decided to capture my days using OBS Studio along with tracking my time with Toggl’s Pomodoro timer. We created a GitHub project, assigned a few tasks and began working.

Our Submission

It was a fun project, quite stressful but enjoyable overall. Here is the link to our submission which we were able to turn in 3 hours before the deadline.

Welcome to my first official post here on the web for UhhHehHeh.com! Allow me to introduce myself and this blog.

Who am I

I’m Abe A.K.A. UhhHehHeh, formerly known as GamingWithAbe… and Professionally Known as YourWebDevGuy and Founder of Pixel Pilgrim Studios.

A brief history lesson

It all started back in 2018 when my nephew suggested that I stream minecraft on YouTube. I was always a fan of Minecraft, but I hadn’t really done any live-streaming before. Curious about the experience I agreed. I streamed regularly and after a year I began to grow slowly but surely. I began to get a small following. First 3, then 5 then 20 and so on. It motivated me to do it more often and more seriously.

I began streaming as “Gaming with Abe” and everything was great, for a while. Until I began to see if I could monetize the channel so that I could upgrade my streaming setup. I only made about $3 from the channel over a year, so I began also streaming on Twitch.

One small problem…

The problem was I am a huge fan of Strategy games like Diablo, Sid Meier’s Civilization series, City Skylines, Anno 1800, Crusader Kings, etc. I’m also a huge fan of fighting games like Brawlhalla, and I enjoy stealthier First-Person shooters like Escape From Tarkov.

Unfortunately, the audience I had gained on YouTube that eventually followed me to Twitch only wanted Minecraft games. If I wasn’t streaming Minecraft, they weren’t joining the stream.

Now, I am a gamer at heart. I have over 1500 games on various platforms, and I’m very active on Steam and Discord but being forced into a box where all I could play was one game really irritated me.

Out of frustration, I simply removed all my followers and deleted my channels which had grown to 100 on YouTube and 600 on Twitch.

Re-inventing myself as UhhHehHeh on Twitch

I did enjoy streaming, and by now I had a nice setup with tons of El Gato equipment (not sponsored btw) including a Stream Deck, El Gato Wave3 Microphone, El Gato Camera, El Gato Key Light, El Gato Green Screen. After all of this invested monies I figured I should keep putting it to use.

I started a new channel on Twitch with a new username: “UhhHehheh”. The name was derived from one of my favorite shows as a young lad: Beavis and Butthead.

The end of a semi-successful Twitch Channel

Now when I say semi-successful, I mean in the context of hitting affiliate within a month and eventually gaining a small but predictable revenue stream of approximately $299 a month. I have friends and family who also streamed on twitch for at least a year with regular streams who were never able to hit affiliate, and they put in as much work as I did, so I considered getting a regular Twitch paycheck success.

For UhhHehHeh on Twitch I peaked at about 499 followers and averaged 30 viewers per stream which alone is quite an achievement.

However, I ended up killing my channel by making one small mistake.

I somehow gained an audience in Mexico, and my chat began to be flooded with Spanish speakers. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that, and I speak both English and Spanish fluently. But as soon as Spanish messages began to hit my chat, my English speakers would tend to leave often with messages such as “Have a great stream Abe! I don’t understand Spanish. I’m going to go watch something else.”

It was very disheartening to see my original subscribers who had been with me from the start begin to fall off.

Although the Spanish followers were quite faithful and showed up often times more regularly than my English audience, it was the English audience that donated bits and subs. The Spanish-speaking audience would co-host my streams and join my tournaments and I had a lot of fun with them.

I was torn. I wasn’t in it for the money but either group didn’t stick around when the other was there. I felt a sense of obligation to the followers paying real money.

I tried scheduling some streams in English on certain days and then Spanish the others, but it didn’t work.

Little by little my channel just died with both groups dissatisfied. When the streams eventually dropped to an audience of 2-3 viewers (one of which I was certain was Nightbot, and the other my girlfriend) I took a break.

By “took a break” I mean, I stopped streaming completely by 2023.

UhhHehHeh revival

I had the domain name which I had purchased for selling merch, game tournament announcements, and scoreboards.

I used the same username for my itch.io profile which I had intended to use while making a few games.

I might as well use it for my Game Dev. A more casual blog vs the professional one for my Indie Game Studio.

How frequently will I post? I have no idea. The game studio venture is a passion project I work on mostly on weekends. If I have time, and as I find something worth sharing, I’ll share it here.

If you’d like to hang out and chat, I’m always on Discord so feel free to join me on my discord server

Thanks!

— UhhHehHeh

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