Four-year indie game earns hundreds of thousands after viral reaction

Cakez launched Tangy TD on Steam on March 9, 2026 — a bright, sprite-art roguelike tower defense in which you play a witch fending off waves of monsters. He had spent four years building the game, beginning the project alone and later marrying and having a child, which raised the stakes around the release.

He learned programming from scratch, spent a year making small games to gain experience, and streamed development on Twitch while uploading videos to YouTube. In a 2020 YouTube video he described an earlier project's failure: "The only solution that I saw was to start over again.

I was very arrogant to think I could start and finish a project. It didn't cross my mind that I could fail." He says he sometimes spent 50 hours on a single video to make a single dollar; after his computer and then his graphics card failed, community members sent PC parts and cash to keep him going.

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