Lente Cuenen’s house sways from side to side in the slight afternoon breeze. It is a snug space. At one end are her bed, a couch and a small TV. At the other a toilet cubicle, the kitchen, her workstation and a table cluttered with curios.
There is a lime green Nintendo DS Lite with its wire-guts spilling out, a 12-volt battery abandoned after a failed attempt at charging her iPhone and a stack of video game cases, including one for Ship Simulator 2008.
Cuenen, a 25-year-old game designer, does not need to simulate life at sea. She grew up on an old barge on the waterways and lakes east of Amsterdam. Her current home is a 50-foot blue-and-white boat that she bought with a $10,000 loan from her mother. “This is my whole life,” she said. “I love this boat.”
For the past two years in the Netherlands, Cuenen has spent most of her days below deck in a wood-paneled cabin, developing the short, meditative video game Spilled!, in which a player cleans up polluted waterways.
Yes, Lente Cuenen made a game about a boat while living on a boat.
Attracting attention to an independent video game is like trying to steer a ship through a hurricane. Last year, almost 19,000 games were released on the online marketplace Steam. Small developers with no marketing budget can get lost at sea.
But by sharing her personal story online, Cuenen attracted attention for Spilled!, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies on Steam since March. Even after its 30 percent cut, she has made well beyond $250,000. Still, she says that freedom is more important than money.
“As long as I have enough to just chill and do my own thing and not have to wake up in time to show up somewhere, I’m really, really happy,” she said.
When I arrived at her home — named the Zusje V, which is Dutch for Sister Five — on a gloomy morning this summer, Cuenen warned me to be careful. The first journalist to visit lost her sunglasses in the canal while leaping aboard. Cuenen and her mother had to fish them out.
Once I stepped onto the Zusje V with my glasses intact, what became clear is that the mechanics of making a video game on a boat are less complicated than you might think. Cuenen spends most of her time in a quaint village near Amsterdam, her boat docked in a quiet waterway in the shadow of an old castle.
When the boat is in the canal, a power cord snakes through a portside window to an exchange on the shore. When Cuenen is at sea, an electric engine, four lithium batteries and a roof covered in solar panels provide enough power for all the amenities of a modern apartment. Cuenen creates games with a MacBook covered by Pokémon stickers and an old PlayStation 3 controller, using Starlink or mobile data to connect to the internet.
Successful independent developers often become part of the story, said James Newnorth, the founder of Spelkollektivet, a co-living community for game developers near Vaxjo, Sweden. Cuenen’s authenticity helped drive the success of Spilled!, he said.
“If it was only the game, most likely, people wouldn’t be that super interested,” he said. What pops is “‘Hey, here’s my game, here’s me, a female game developer with a unique story.’”
This is not just a marketing tool for Cuenen. Her game — eco-conscious, understated, relaxing — is a reflection of her beliefs. She says 10 cents from every copy will be donated to a conservation fund for cetaceans, and she lives as sustainably as she can, trying to avoid buying new stuff. “I’m really passionate about this kind of lifestyle,” she said.
Cuenen has been pulling the lime green Nintendo DS apart and putting it back together again for a decade, conceding that it might finally be dead. Her home is filled with secondhand goods. The table was bought at a thrift shop. So was the TV. Her speakers were hand-me-downs from her father.
Her love for boats was a hand-me-down, too. Her father was crazy about them and, in 1995, her parents purchased the Twee Gezusters (Two Sisters), a barge built in 1920. It served as the family home for nearly two decades.
When her family would travel to Belgium on vacation, Cuenen created games in the quiet hours between short hikes and family dinners. Her first, made at 14 with her younger brother, was a side scroller whose main character was the vacation home’s teddy bear. A small section had a boat.
Cuenen’s high school years were marred with a “kind of depression,” she said. She stopped attending classes and rarely ventured outdoors, built her own computer and spent most of her time on multiplayer games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty and a lot of Minecraft. With the support of her parents, she dragged herself out of the slump and completed her diploma. In 2019, she began pursuing an information technology degree in Amsterdam, minoring in game development. But a year in, she quit.
She made a second attempt at college in 2022 with a course designed for students to hone specific game development skills. She picked programming but quickly found she wanted to do more.
“It was too specialized,” she said. “I wanted to go through all of the steps, from programming to marketing to design to publishing.”
She quit again, and went all-in on solo development.
Cuenen’s idea for Spilled! germinated in college, where she had been messing around with a game in which the player controlled a boat. But she was rudderless. “I just kind of kept working on the thing without really knowing where I was going,” she said.
After a slight panic about committing to game development, she had the idea to incorporate a collection mechanic. Instead of Mario’s coins or Sonic’s rings, players would collect oil.
Spilled! had its primary gameplay loop: clean up rivers and streams by hoovering up oil spills before upgrading your boat to take on even bigger spills. While there is a clear environmental angle, Cuenen said she did not build the game to make a statement.
“It’s more the general idea of pollution and people not caring enough about the planet,” said Cuenen, who recalled the discarded plastic bottles that would clot together in the canals where she grew up.
Interest in Spilled! grew after Cuenen started posting about her seafaring life on Twitter in 2022. When a 26-year-old computer scientist from Germany offered to help overhaul the game’s graphics, she was wary, noting that she sometimes has trouble working with others. But she could see how his mock-ups gave the game a more refined look.
At Cuenen’s workstation, she shows me the financial figures for Spilled!, a $6 game that smashed through 50,000 sales by the end of April. They have ebbed and flowed since but should spike again when versions are released on Switch, Xbox and PlayStation consoles. She has also been experimenting with the game engine Godot, releasing the small platformer Goldino about a coin-collecting Tyrannosaurus rex.
Her success enabled Cuenen to pay back the $10,000 loan from her mother in May. She now owns the boat. Her father died in 2021 after a prolonged battle with colon cancer, and Cuenen’s voice softens when she talks about it.
“He would have loved to see me blossom and go out into the world,” she said.
As the sun comes out, Cuenen guides me on a walk to the edge of the village. Standing on a hill overlooking the marina, she points out the spot where her family’s boat would dock each summer. She speaks of that time fondly: games of tag with her brother, sneaking into ruins through a crack in the wall. Sometimes, she would tell her parents she was going to meet friends before heading to the library and loading Minecraft in a web browser instead. Of course, she would build a boat.
Cuenen pulls back the left sleeve on her hoodie. Underneath, tattooed in black ink, are the words “Twee Gezusters 1920.” As she runs her fingers across them, she eases into her memories. She tells me there is a Dutch word for this feeling, “heimwee,” that is like homesickness but more metaphorical.
Yes, Lente Cuenen made a game about a boat while living on a boat. She also made the same thing she had been creating since she could code: a game about home.
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