Distant Illusions Hits Gamescom (Again!)

What happens when you let three indie devs with questionable business acumen make games for a multi-million dollar corporation?

If you suckers have been following us for a while, you probably know about our long-running relationship with the folks at Opera and their gaming browser, Opera GX. It's been a wild ride. We've made everything from virtual pets to 2.5D arcade racers for them.

Well, I'm proud to announce that we did it again!

For Gamescom 2025, we made Browser Bootcamp, a frantic collection of microgames where players competed for high scores to win prizes. Like, you know, stickers and stuff.

This was initially going to be a short post about things that went into the making of the game, but then I realized that...well, we've made a bunch of other games for Opera in the past that we never really got to talk about. So, I thought it'd be a good idea to do a big ol' retrospective. I mean, it's not like you can play most of them yourself anyway, so this is a good opportunity to tell you about them.

So, let's take a trip down memory lane and look at all the weird stuff we've built for Opera over the years, from oldest to newest.

Idle Aura (2023)

Our first project was Idle Aura, a virtual pet game featuring Opera GX's mascot, Aura, made to celebrate the browser's third birthday. Or was it the second? Honestly, I don't remember.

There isn't a whole lot to say about this one. It's a cute little virtual pet game. You click buttons, Aura does things, and the bars go up and down. It also has a few minigames, all represented by 'lil arcade cabinets.

One of these minigames is just Operius, but condensed a little bit. The other two are completely original, based on ideas given to us by the Opera guys, though we ended up expanding on them quite a lot. It was honestly a fun challenge taking a concept as basic as “the Chrome dinosaur game but Opera” and making it something more interesting, with different enemies to avoid, a different progression system, and whatnot.

The graphics here were done by Gaem, the honorary third member of Distant Illusions, who's insanely goated. In fact, he worked with us on all our games except for Operius DX. We probably should've gotten him to do some promotional art for that one too, but I was very stubborn, and wanted to do everything myself.

But yeah, Idle Aura. Honestly, the whole thing was really fun to make, and I think it's quite fun to play too! In fact, you can still play it if you got Opera GX, so go knock yourself out. Even if you don't have Opera GX, I was told by little birdies that there might be an unofficial version floating around that works with any browser. Can't say for sure, do your own research! *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*

I guess the biggest challenge with this game was building a UI framework in GameMaker. For some reason, I got it in my head that it absolutely had to have keyboard support, because accessibility...or something. I was very noble. Ultimately, I'm pretty sure zero people ever used the keyboard to navigate the menus, and one of the minigames doesn't even support it. But hey, it's the thought that counts.

Oh yeah, while the folks at Opera were a delight to work with, they also decided to rename the game to “Mini Idle Aura” right before it went live. Without telling us. Was it a mistake? A last-minute marketing stroke of genius? We'll never know. The life of a contractor is full of mysteries.

Space Opera GX (2023)

Later that year, we were asked to make a game for the Opera GX booth at Gamescom 2023, specifically a shoot 'em up. The result was Space Opera GX, which ran on a custom arcade cabinet. Whoa!

The prospect of making an arcade game in 2023 was absolutely insane to me. Like, I'm a big arcade nerd, but I was born well after arcades started dying off, and I live in a country without many arcades to begin with. So, you know, making an arcade game was something I never thought I'd get a chance to. Imagine my excitement when I heard about the offer!

There was one issue, though… I don't really like shoot 'em ups. I don't even play them. How in the FUCK was I supposed to make a game in a genre I wasn't even familiar with?

Well, the solution was obvious, I just needed to get familiar! I did a TON of research, playing through games like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi, and several other '90s classics. I basically mainlined the entire genre in two weeks.

In the end, I think the game turned out pretty damn good. Sure, the pacing isn't exactly the best and there's a bit of downtime between enemy spawns, but for a guy who didn't know a shmup from a schmuck a month prior, I'm still happy with the result.

Were people at Gamescom happy with it? Turns out, yeah! We actually weren't present at the event ourselves, that wasn't really an option, but from what we heard from the Opera guys, the game was a hit!

It wasn't all painless, though.

See, on day one, I kept getting feedback from the Opera guys that the game was good, but it was “too slow”, and we should speed it up. I was baffled. Too slow? If we made it any faster, nobody would be able to keep up! It would pretty much become a bullet hell.

Was it lag? I mean, sure, the computer they stuffed in the cabinet wasn't exactly a powerhouse, but it shouldn't have been a problem. I tested the game on a 10-year-old laptop and it ran just fine. On their end, though, the game was running at half speed. What gives?

After a frantic back-and-forth, the culprit was revealed: they had connected the cabinet to an external 4K display. The poor little PC couldn't handle outputting 4K at 60 FPS, so it defaulted to 30. And since I, in my infinite wisdom, hadn't bothered with delta time implementation (I was lazy and on a deadline), the game logic was tied to the framerate.

It was a pain to diagnose all the way from another country over text, but eventually, I figured it out and told them to just set the monitor to 1080p. And voilà, the game was running at the correct speed. Just, you know, not during day one…

But hey, let this be a lesson. If I had actually been a “good programmer” and implemented delta time, we never would've figured out that the game was running at half the framerate. Sometimes, laziness pays off.

Opera GX Racing (2023)

This one is funny. As we were wrapping up Space Opera GX, we got an email from a different part of Opera's marketing department. They wanted us to make a racing game for a competition in Mexico that involved F1 or something.

Their initial pitch was...puzzling. Like, one of their core requirements was that the game should have a camera “like Need for Speed”. Yes, Need for Speed.

Excuse me, but what the fuck do you mean by “like Need for Speed”? Do you even know what kind of games we make, or what engine we use?

But then I got a genius idea. I've already told you guys I love '90s arcade games. One of my favorites is the original OutRun. I fucking love OutRun, especially because of its weird pseudo-3D graphics. If you couldn't tell by now, I have a thing for that kinda stuff.

So...yeah, what if we just made a game like OutRun? Well, the Opera guys approved the idea, and we went ahead with it! The result was Opera GX Racing!

I'm planning to write a full technical deep-dive on how we pulled it off, so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details, stay tuned for that. But in short, the main difficulty didn't come from the complexity of the rendering system (which was, in fact, quite complex), it was the fact that we didn't have much time! Again, they reached out to us before we had finished Space Opera GX, and the deadline was in two months. But through sheer willpower, we managed to pull it off.

Now, was the game a hit? I have absolutely no idea!

The game was initially supposed to be playable only at select physical locations with those racing sim setups. We were asked some questions about making it work on them, but we never found out if it was actually used at those locations in Mexico. I'll assume it was, but we don't really know for sure. For this project, communication wasn't the best, as we were dealing with a different team inside Opera.

I say “initially” because, right as we finished the game, they dropped a bomb on us: we had to make it playable on GX.games too. Which was...rough. We were forced to do some serious last-minute optimization work to get it running at a reasonable framerate in a browser.

Now, did people like the game on GX.games, at least? Again, no idea!

The game wasn't put on GX.games permanently, but as a limited-time event for Mexican users only. Plus, GX.games has no comments system, so for all I know, it could be hated by everyone who played it. I'll just assume everyone loved it. It's better for my ego.

Seriously, though, this might be one of my favorite games I've ever made. Period. I love how it turned out and I'm so immensely proud of it, especially the visuals. I hope one day we get to make a similar game we can actually release.

Browser Bootcamp (2025)

After almost two years, we're back working with Opera again, making a game for Gamescom 2025.

Browser Bootcamp is essentially a WarioWare clone where you play through five microgames (labeled as “exercises”) to join the “Browser Liberation Army” or something.

Five microgames doesn't sound like much, because it isn't, and that's by design. A single playthrough of Space Opera GX could last over five minutes, and that was waaaaaaay too long. This time, we were asked to aim for a single minute per playthrough. That meant we could only have five microgames per playthrough, and we had to keep the pacing very tight. Any tighter and it would've been illegal in several countries!

Now, don't worry, there are actually ten microgames. The game just chooses five randomly to make each playthrough feel fresh. Sure, you only got one try while at the convention, but there was a massive screen where you could watch other people play the game, which meant that if we didn't randomize it a bit, then it'd become a bit too predictable.

And really, the quick pacing was a bit of a blessing in disguise too. Despite the game being very highly inspired by WarioWare, it ended up feeling a lot more frantic, in a good way!

I also took some inspiration from the Rhythm Heaven games, where everything happens exactly to the beat of the music. In those games, you actually need to match your actions to the music, which is something I've always been really bad at. Here it doesn't really affect the gameplay, but it does wonders to put you in the game's rhythm. This was actually something we planned for our next big game, so it's nice that we got to try it out here first!

Another thing we got to try out was going all out with our own weird sense of humor. Some of Opera's own brand of “Haha, Microsoft Edge is bad, am I right gamers?” style of humor is present here too, but we ended up sneaking in a lot of very “Distant Illusions” kind of humor too. For example, one of the microgames is made entirely of pictures we took, instead of Gaem's beautiful pixel art.

Another one is a microgame parodying Mario, where if you kill all the enemies you get...this screen.

The development of this game was a bit of a mess. Not because of the game itself, nor because of Opera, but because of the circumstances surrounding it. If you read our newsletter from the start of August, you'll know that I had plans to attend Gamescom in person this time. The process for getting a visa was long, painful, and expensive. The folks at Opera did their best to assist me and even wrote a letter to the German embassy to support my application. Heck, I even got Koelnmesse, the organizers of Gamescom, to write another letter! Everyone was rooting for me!

And in the end, all I got for my troubles was a rejection letter very explicitly accusing me of planning to abandon my career to become an illegal kebab spinner in Cologne. Because yeah, of course, someone who gets an invitation letter from the biggest game convention in the world would pull that off. Makes complete sense.

So, yeah, that was a massive hit to our morale, and a huge waste of time and money too. Worse, at that point, all we had managed to get done for the game was a framework and unfinished prototypes for about five microgames, thanks to the whole visa saga. We had to get about 60% of the development done in the last two weeks before the event.

Yet somehow, we fully finished the game with a day to spare! Hooray!

We even had time to get some people to playtest it. Their reaction was essentially, “This is fine, but maybe too easy”. Which made sense. I wanted to keep the game a bit on the easier side since most people playing would be casual convention-goers, not hardcore gamers. I had a rough idea of what to expect based on the reactions to Space Opera GX.

Still, I tweaked things slightly to make it a bit harder, and the Opera guys seemed happy with the result. But then, we encountered the worst nightmare of every game developer.

Game journalists.

Turns out, they sucked ASS at the game. The suggestion from the Opera guys was to add prompts telling players what to do, which buttons to press, etc. My response was a pretty firm "NO FUCKING WAY!!!". Okay, it wasn't exactly that, but there was no way I was going to clutter the screen with stupid fucking button prompts.

See, this is a WarioWare clone. The whole point is to guess what you're supposed to do in a short amount of time, based on the initial prompt and visual clues. Telling people exactly what to do would defeat the whole purpose!

And so, we went with a more creative compromise, where the less obvious games would have these small indicators that fit the overall style of the game. Is it what I would've wanted? No. But if we wanted game journalists to have a chance, that's what we had to do. Plus I cannot really complain too much when Opera has given us THIS MUCH creative freedom to begin with.

In the end, the whole thing was a bit bittersweet. We weren't able to attend the event in person to connect with other developers and see people playing our game live, and we had to make some last-minute changes that I still grumble about. But the game was a hit, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. And you know, I guess that's all that matters.

(Right? Right??? Please tell me that's all that matters.)

So, What's The Takeaway?

I don't know, man. I'm awful at these conclusion paragraphs, and I'm already tired.

I guess the takeaway is that video games are more than just the final product. They're a story. A story of the development process. A story of the mistakes, the successes, and the lessons learned. A story of the people who made it and the people who played it.

And it's always fun to look back on this stuff. I pity the vibe game devs of the future who will never get to experience having to optimize a game on a super tight deadline. That might not sound like a fun time, but for me, it was a unique challenge, and it's a good story to tell too. I think that alone makes it all worth it.

Now, onto more stories…

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