Shawn Hougo, 55, isn't a gamer. By his own admission, he hadn't done much with computers since 2005. What he had was 10 or 15 spare minutes here and there, a fondness for matching games, and a growing irritation at having to pay to play them.
"I hate having to pay to play. So I started developing my own."
What started as a simple flat-grid matching game turned into something Shawn had never seen before: a 3D matching game.
"I was like, hm, I've never seen a 3D matching game before. I wonder if I could do that."
He found Rosebud while working on an outline for a book, and it changed the math entirely. A project he estimates would have taken seven or eight more months on his own came together in about three.
Rosebud wasn't Shawn's first brush with AI. He'd been using ChatGPT to organize notes and outline his book. So when we sat down with him, we had to ask: what fascinated you about Rosebud compared to the other AI tools you'd been using, and how did it help you most?
"The thing that I love about it the most is that you can watch the AI reason with itself. If it wasn't for that, I would have never finished my game."
He means it literally. At one point, a stubborn bug kept producing false matches. The fix came from reading the AI's own reasoning: to make a circular board, it had built a cube of cells and hidden the edges, but tiles were still dropping into the invisible cells.
"It had a line in its reasoning and I was like, oh, that's the problem."
The result is Quantum Agent — a 3D matching game unlike anything Shawn had seen before, now live on Steam and collecting wishlists, with a playable demo on the way. He registered a company, Hougo Entertainment, to publish it: a step that sounded intimidating until he actually took it.
"It's not expensive to start a company. I think it was like 300 bucks out of my pocket."
Here's the part that still makes him laugh: he didn't know what Steam was when he started. One of the AIs suggested his game was good enough to put there. "It took longer for me to learn the whole Steam process than it did making the game."
The game is finding players, too. The mobile version, rebuilt on Rosebud in just two weeks, has been played over 300 times on the platform.
"I was like, oh my god, somebody likes my game."
And the momentum hasn't stopped at games. When Shawn learned his son, who builds bridges for a living, had to juggle three different calculators to do his job, he built a single unified concrete bridge calculator on Rosebud in one night. "If you told me that a year ago, I would have called you a liar."
The speed curve tells the story of the platform as much as the person: three months for the first game in January. Two weeks for the mobile version. One night for the calculator. "There's a huge difference between what I was doing on Rosebud back in January versus what I was doing in June."
What's next? Finishing his book, and then a far more ambitious project featuring a zero-gravity water park and a spaceship riding on soliton waves — which may become a game, a graphic novel, or both.
You don't need to be a developer. You don't need to be a gamer. You just need an idea that annoys you enough.
Play Quantum Agent
Quantum Agent is live now. Jump in to the demo on Rosebud, and add it to your Steam wishlist to be first in line when the playable game drops.
- Play it now: Orbital Jam on Rosebud.
- Wishlist the full game on Steam: Quantum Agent on Steam.
Andi Bucescu
Andi is the Head of Marketing at Rosebud, where she writes about the intersection of AI, creativity, and brand storytelling. She explores how generative AI is reshaping marketing strategies and creative workflows, with a focus on making complex technology accessible and cutting through the noise of modern campaigns. Her perspective is informed by undergraduate research on effective social media content and consumer psychology.