Kasia showed up to her first Opensant session with a laptop and an apology. “I’m not really a creative person,” she said. “I just write code.” Six weeks later, she was demoing a pixel-art puzzle game she’d been secretly building for two years.
That’s the thing about labels. Kasia is a senior backend developer at a fintech company. She’s brilliant at what she does. But the thing that lights her up — the thing she talks about with actual fire in her eyes — is a game about a cat navigating a dream world.
“I never showed it to anyone because I thought they’d think it was silly,” she told us. “But when I plugged into the projector at Opensant, people actually gasped at the art. Someone asked if they could compose the soundtrack. I went home that night and worked on it until 3am for the first time in months.”
Kasia’s game is now in beta testing with twelve players she met through the community. She’s still a developer by day. But she no longer apologises for being a creator.