Why Mudflood?

20 Jan 2026

TLDR

"Isn't it a waste of time to create an unprofitable hobby video game? Wouldn't your time be better spent making a SaaS instead?"

My answer is no. I think a lot of "ruthless optimizers" out there would be surprised at how much of a better use of time hobby game development can be when compared to hobby CRUD SaaS development.

What is Mudflood?

Mudflood is a browser MMORPG that I make with a small group of friends. You can click here to try it out without needing to download anything or sign up first.

Make Something People Want

I'm pretty serious about software development. I like to move fast and break things. I like to work on hard problems.

But it's all a waste of time at the end of the day unless you make something people want. The difficulty of finding product-market fit far exceeds that of any technical problem I've seen in practice.

The software industry is rife with products that people don't really want. Such products are often subsidized by heavy speculation and cyclic sales networks. But I can't blame anyone - honestly! This sort of process often serves to get things up and running, then eventually it all pays off and the healthy cashflows come later. But this being the state of software as an industry makes it hard to even think of a feasible, profitable software idea that other people would actually want...

I've tried and tried to come up with software side project ideas that could eventually turn into a thriving business. It's just insanely hard! Even if I had millions of dollars to spend on software development, I would hardly know where to start. The space of valuable software is very saturated. You have to be in the top 0.01% of skill and luck to create a single crumb of usefulness.

Fortunately for me, I stumbled on a side project that is one such crumb! It just so happens to be a video game.

Another adage in the startup world: do things that don't scale. Though Mudflood is still a small game, I'm proud that we develop incrementally between fully gameified versions that anyone can play (the same development practice as Minecraft's beta, not to be confused with Early Access). The game today is not even 1% of what we plan for it, and yet many people already find it fun. Players have already spent well over a hundred cumulative hours in the game. There is a shockingly clear path for us to bring this number up well into the tens of thousands and beyond.

I like to work on things that have clear upside. Even if that upside is tiny, I want it to be clear and real and have the potential to grow. I believe Mudflood has this. It's not a "serious" software product to build a business on. It's not a startup. It's not a SaaS. It's not something I want to sell. But it is something people want. It's also genuinely fun and challenging in ways that are hard to come by in small-time software development. What more could I really ask for in a side project?

The Power of Friendship

I work on Mudflood with my brother and our two closest childhood friends. It's been a great creative and technical outlet for all of us. But more importantly it keeps us in touch even though we're spread across the country. We grew up playing video games together so it's really fun to make a video game together as adults.

Why the name "Mudflood"?

MUD stands for Multi User Dungeon. Many of the earliest online multiplayer video games were MUDs.

A "MUD flood" is a rethinking and repopularization of MUD game design elements.

It's also the name of a deranged pseudohistory of Earth, which we take some small inspiration from for our game's world-building.