WIZARD SHRIMP GAMES

It all started in May 2015 when a young developer called Josh discovered Clicker Heroes and thought, "I could make something like this."

Armed with nothing but Game Maker Studio 2, MS Paint for the art, and FL Studio for the music, every asset was hand-crafted from scratch on a zero budget.

In January 2018, the very first game shipped: Stick Adventures: Wizard Madness — a scrappy, hand-drawn title that managed 190 sales. Alongside it, a free release on Itch.io pulled in 40 downloads.

Then came the big one. While working a full-time day job, Josh spent 2.5 years building Wizard Shrimp in his evenings — a bullet-hell roguelite starring a magical crustacean. The company was officially incorporated as PISTOL SHRIMP GAMES LTD in April 2022, later rebranding to WIZARD SHRIMP GAMES LTD in February 2024.

Wizard Shrimp launched on December 13, 2024. After two weeks: 65 sales — mostly friends and family. By late January, it had crawled to 120 copies.

Then everything changed. On January 28, 2025, a single TikTok video went nuclear — 2 million views in 48 hours. The comments were brutal. Thousands of strangers called the game "trash" and said Josh had "wasted his life."

But in the attention economy, visibility wins. Content creators rallied. YouTubers covered the game. Within 4 days, sales exploded from 120 to over 1,100 copies. By the end, lifetime sales hit 1,500–1,800 units, generating ~£2,000 net profit — all with zero marketing spend.

Every penny was reinvested back into the company.

With real capital in the war chest, Josh levelled up the studio. The £2,000 was reinvested to hire Toltus, a professional pixel artist from Malmö, Sweden, to create stunning high-quality sprites, animations, and UI for the next game.

The result: Mushroom Clicker — a cozy idle game launched on November 28, 2025. Professional translations in 12 languages opened the global market. In just 72 hours, the game moved 464 units and recouped 25% of its £4,000 budget.

Josh adopted radical financial transparency, sharing exact income, expenses, and tax breakdowns on the studio's YouTube channel — building a devoted community invested in the studio's success.

Now, the studio's third title — Pestered, an intense fast-paced platformer — is in development for a May 2026 release, backed by a Kickstarter campaign.