solo gamE development — Potsdam, Germany
Hello there!
Welcome to RETRIEBEAR where I building bold, hand-crafted games.
Part golden retriever enthusiasm, part bear stubbornness. Both halves are in the logo and honestly, both are needed to finish a game alone.
One person, every pixel — designed, coded and fully tested by me.
Who I am
One Developer. One Passion. Unlimited Ideas.
RETRIEBEAR is my one-man games company in Potsdam. By day I work as a Lead Cloud Architect and by evening and night I put ten years of professional engineering into the games I always dreamed of.
Being solo is the feature, not the bug: no meetings, no committees, no design-by-averaging. Every system is built, broken and rebuilt until it feels right — and if it is not fun on a rainy Tuesday, it does not ship.
10+
Years in IT
5
Games in the pipeline
My stack
Tools of the trade
The daily drivers — from engine to invoices. Colours nod to each tool’s brand, but official logos stay with their owners.
- Godot
- Blender
- Sourcetree
- Photoshop
- Affinity
- Ableton Live
- DaVinci Resolve
- Figma
- FontForge
- Visual Studio Code
- Sublime
- Jira
- Confluence
- Outlook
- Collmax
What I do
Three crafts, one pair of hands
01
Engineering
A decade of professional software engineering goes into every build: clean architecture, tight performance budgets, and tooling that lets one person move like a small team.
02
Game Design
I design small-scope games with deep systems — mechanics you understand fairly quickly and are still mastering ten hours later. Prototype fast, playtest hard, cut without mercy.
03
Cloud & AI
My day-job superpower: cloud architecture and an AI-focused engineering background. It shows up in smarter systems, online features that scale, and infrastructure that never wakes me at 3 a.m.
My games
The pipeline
Arcade Puzzle
STACKROW
A falling-block puzzler about greed: every cleared row raises the stakes, and cashing out one drop too late costs you the run.
Action Sandbox
WORLDBREAKER
Crack open procedurally built worlds along their fault lines, harvest the core, and get out before the whole thing comes apart around you.
Unannounced
Work in Progress
Too early to talk about. What I can say: it is the most ambitious of the three — and yes, there will be a bear.
How I work
Solo by choice
Players first
No dark patterns, no paywalls mid-run. If a feature only serves a metric, I cut it. I am not running behind money but rather want to create something enjoyable!
Small scope, deep polish
I’d rather ship one tight, finished idea, that has been tested and runs without any issues, than three ambitious sloppy half-games.
Engineered, not improvised
Architect discipline from my day job: sementic versioned builds, automated tests, boring reliability.
Built in the open
Devlogs, honest patch notes and playable builds early. You’ll watch these games grow up.
“Wait — one person made this?”— every playtester so far, and my favourite compliment