From Chaos to Code
The CheddaTech Founder Story
I'm the founder of CheddaTech. This is how a broken iMac, a £120 laptop, and a refusal to quit turned into open, developer-first infrastructure for indie games.
From Freebay to Code
It started with a dead iMac I found on Freebay in late 2023. The screen was black but it made startup sounds, so I cracked it open. Loose display cable. Reconnected it, replaced the hard drive, and hit my first real debugging challenge: a faulty RAM stick that kept throwing errors I'd never seen before. Hours of googling later, I had a working machine. I'd never owned a Mac before. To me, it was a beast.
I installed Godot 3.6 (the best that 14-year-old hardware could handle) and built my first game: The Cheese Game.
That small project awakened something bigger. Existing backend options for indie games were expensive, centralized, and fragile. I started imagining CheddaBoards: a universal, open, permanent system for leaderboards, achievements, analytics, and identity.
Losing Everything
By early 2025, I had momentum: a new computer, a working game prototype, and early concepts for CheddaBoards. My wife was one of the first to test the Cheese Game builds.
Then my marriage collapsed suddenly and destructively. I lost my home, my computers, my pets. Everything except an old cloud backup of my game.
I became homeless overnight with nothing but that backup as a lifeline.
Rebuilding on a £120 Laptop
Living in a hostel, I scraped together £120 for a battered Dell Latitude 7490. On that laptop, I recovered my project from the cloud and kept building.
I released The Cheese Game 0.72 while still homeless. Proof that creation doesn't require perfect circumstances.
A month later, I found work as a live-in chef at a 900-year-old pub that was being used as a film set for Practical Magic 2. Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock were filming while I cooked 50-hour weeks.
After service, I'd climb to my tiny room and code until 3 AM. My boss saw an exhausted chef. I saw someone rebuilding his future one line at a time.
The Phoenix Project
From those late-night sessions came CheddaTech. An ecosystem built on three beliefs:
- Open by default
- Transparent by design
- Permanent infrastructure no one can take away
CheddaBoards
A post-infrastructure backend for indie developers: leaderboards, achievements, profiles, analytics, and multi-auth. All running on ICP canisters. No vendor lock-in. Self-host anytime. Your data, your rules.
CheddaGames
Indie games like The Cheese Game, powered by our own infrastructure. Living proof that small studios can build big things when they own their tools.
The Mission
CheddaTech isn't just a company. It's my declaration of independence. Every line of code is built from the perspective of someone who once lost everything and learned what truly matters: ownership, permanence, and freedom.
CheddaBoards gives indie developers what I desperately needed but didn't have: transparent, permanent, open infrastructure that can't be taken away. No gatekeepers. No surprise pricing. No platform that can disappear overnight.
If you're tired of building on platforms that could vanish tomorrow, you're not alone. Let's build something permanent together.
The Journey So Far
What's Next
I'm now back in New Zealand with a clear mission: grow CheddaBoards into the infrastructure layer that indie game developers deserve, expand CheddaGames as living proof of what's possible, and build CheddaTech into a sustainable company that can't be destroyed by circumstances.
From a broken iMac to gaming infrastructure. From homelessness to building the future of indie gaming. CheddaTech is proof that rock bottom can be a foundation.
Still coding on that £120 Dell Latitude 7490.
Still building.