Indie dev behind quietly massive Steam trend says they only learned to code 5 years ago but have made 2 games selling 750,000 copies: "I still don't believe it myself sometimes"

One indie developer only learned to code about five years ago but they've already released two games, managed to sell a whopping 750,000 copies, and quietly kickstarted a major Steam trend.

The developer who goes by Mister Morris Games released an idle farming sim you may have heard of called Rusty's Retirement only last year. It's about a dog, named Rusty, who does all sorts of Stardew Valley-esque chores at the bottom of your desktop while you do literally anything else. You can work, help him, play another game, or literally go away and he'll still be watering plants.

Mister Morris Games has now taken a step back to reflect on their success. "I started to learn how to code five years ago and since then I've released two games which have a combined total of 750,000 units sold," they share on Twitter. "I still don't believe it myself sometimes."

It's not too surprising – Rusty's Retirement contributed to an influx of chill idle sims on the platform, which even led to an entire Steam Fest dedicated to the budding subgenre. But the semi-viral hit isn't doing all the heavy lifting. In a follow-up tweet, the developer says that the similarly well-received, old-school Metroidvania Haiku, the Robot has actually sold around 200,000 copies. "It keeps getting recommend in subreddits."

"I basically picked based off of the game engine I wanted to use," Mister Morris says about getting started. "In this case, I picked Unity and C# because it had so much documentation online and that felt like a good place to start learning."

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