Designing Huey the Game

Huey came out of an idea that had been circling for years: build a game that teaches the principles of colour through a story. A sensory experience, more or less.

It started as a personal project, no expectations. Then Leo Gama joined, and later we set up Nude Studio — the studio Huey will ship under. Then a long pause. And recently, the return.

I'm at a stage where I want to strip everything back. More impact with fewer elements, less noise.

Huey's aesthetic is minimalist: colour and basic geometric shapes. Clean, almost childlike, but loaded with intent. Every visual decision — a shadow, a gradient, a contrast — has a narrative reason.

An exercise in restraint: say a lot with very little.

Early on, development was a disaster (the good kind). I went at it like a madman with ChatGPT, no plan, no structure, just wanting the thing to run. Weeks of testing, breaking, rewriting code, learning Unity the hard way. The tool helped, sure, but it was still young: it got things wrong as often as I did.

Then Leo arrived, and with him order, logic and rhythm. He worked the concept, the story, the colour analysis, the poetic sense behind each level. I took the visual design, the animation and the Unity integration. Back to Figma for design and assets, and Procreate for animation and texture.

And then the project stopped. It didn't die: it fell asleep. Other work came in, other deadlines, and Huey ended up where so many personal projects end up — impeccably documented and never played.

I picked Huey back up in June 2026. This time the unlock was Codex.

I didn't ask it to “make me a game”. I wrote it a brief. A long document, almost a GDD for a code agent: audit the repo before touching anything, don't bulldoze it, keep what works, use visible placeholders instead of inventing assets, document everything. Order first, code second. The same thing Leo brought to the concept, applied to development.

The result: a Unity 6 project that compiles, a real flow of Boot → menu → Chapter 1 (Cyan), a Free Play mode — a colour lab with no objective, just mixing and listening —, local saves, and a WebGL build that ships with two commands. Huey already plays in the browser: huey-the-game.vercel.app

What have I learned from this? That Codex executes. I still decide what feels right, what's excess, when a level lies. The difference isn't that AI thinks for me; it's that I no longer lose three weeks fighting a compile error instead of designing.

So far there's one playable chapter that proves part of the level architecture, and the rest structured as data, waiting for content. No music, no sound, Huey's animations are missing, seven chapters are missing.

Huey ships under Nude Studio.

For now it moves, it mixes, and when the colour lands it does the only thing that mattered from the start: it makes you want to go again.

If you want to know more about Huey and keep up with where it's going, please subscribe in my website.