To start a game studio, I kicked a stone down the street every day for five months. Today that stone has 30,000 followers.
I know it sounds absurd. But it was a deliberate strategy. Let me tell you the whole thing from the start.
I had to be visible
I’ve been making games for years, and my dream was always to build my own studio. But there’s a hard truth: if nobody knows who you are, building an audience that will download your game, support it, and follow along is nearly impossible. Especially now, when thousands of pieces of content go out every day and everyone is fighting to be seen.
So I asked myself one question: how do you actually build a brand from zero today?
My answer: right in front of people, but without shouting “I’m building a brand.”
One stone, three rules
I was looking for a format that would look like “throwaway content” from the outside but, underneath, become a real brand-building process. I had three rules:
- It had to be something not yet done in Turkey
- It had to feature a character people could connect with
- It had to be something I could stretch out over months
I searched for weeks. Eventually I found a video of a man abroad kicking the same stone every day until it turned round. It hadn’t been done in Turkey. It fit every one of my rules.
The next day I went outside, found a stone, and shot the first video. I had no expectations at all; after posting it, I fell asleep. When I woke up, it had passed 10,000 views.
How a stone became a character
From there it moved fast. I asked my followers to suggest a name for the stone, and it became Turşu. One of its eyes wore away as I kicked it, so I drew on a pirate eyepatch. People were no longer following a stone; they were following a character. The videos reached millions of views.
But views were never the goal. I ran contests, set up prize stone-hunts, and answered every single DM one by one. Because I wasn’t trying to build an audience, I was trying to build a community. And there was a promise I made to that community from the very beginning:
I was going to make Turşu’s game.
I didn’t get here the easy way
Let me be honest: this wasn’t my first attempt. Before this there was:
- A t-shirt brand that didn’t take off
- Half-finished publishing attempts
- Game projects nobody played
- Investor meetings I walked into without knowing what a pitch deck was
- Six or seven social media accounts that went nowhere
Maybe I failed at all of them. But each time, instead of blaming the outside world, I looked at what I had learned. What brought me here wasn’t motivation; it was obsession, curiosity, and the nerve to try again.
And the first game is live
Today the first concrete output of that process is out: turshugames.com is live, and the first game is playable right now in your browser. A second game for Google Play is in testing, so it’s on the way too.
One day, in this studio’s office, I want to display that stone, rounded smooth from being kicked. Maybe the best part of the story will be that day.