Spilled! creator Lente in the boat where she lives and makes games.
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Of the hundreds of indie games released on Steam each week, only a fortunate few become breakout hits.
Last week’s biggest winner was the viral drug-dealing simulator Schedule I . But it wasn’t the only game that managed to crack 1,000 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews in its first week. The other surprise was Spilled!, a bite-sized game about cleaning up waterways.
Spilled! puts you into a cute little solar-powered boat which you use to slurp up oil spills and gently, slowly , push floating cans and bottles into recycling bins, earning coins which unlock boat upgrades to speed up your task. It’s a meditative experience that you can finish in about an hour.
And you probably will finish it, because there’s something viscerally compelling about watching the game’s muddy brown waters gradually brighten to a clear blue as you putter around. Once each area is cleared, the next litter-strewn and oil-slicked environment beckons. So it goes for eight or nine turns of Spilled!’s game loop. And since it only costs $5.99, a solid 95% of Steam reviewers have given it a thumbs-up.
But maybe more compelling than the game’s price is its backstory. Spilled! was made primarily by a 25-year-old Dutch game developer called Lente, who lives on a boat which she purchased and renovated.
The sun shines on Spilled!
A few years ago, Lente made a YouTube channel and began logging the development of the game that ultimately became Spilled! At first, she was attempting to build the game entirely without a game engine, and though that didn’t pan out, her other efforts seemed charmed with preternaturally good fortune.
After making a Twitter account to try and make more game developer friends, the very first tweet Lente ever posted went semi-viral, earning her a following and a community. “That kinda jump started it I think,” Lente says. As buzz began building around her game, she says, “I started getting into events and showcases, and those really grew the wishlist count for Spilled! ”
After an early demo for the game did particularly well on Steam, Lente decided to make a Kickstarter campaign, which was successfully funded in the first 12 hours.
Lente’s streak of good fortune continued when a member of her Discord community reached out with an offer to rework Spilled’s 3D pixel art style. The artist, Starbi, had been following Lente’s efforts since her early YouTube days.
“He showed me some of his previous art,” Lente says, “and made a mockup for Spilled!. I quickly got very excited as he is truly, very talented with 3D pixel art.” Starbi joined the project officially, and the duo were able to show off the game’s visual update when Spilled! earned a promo slot in last June’s Wholesome Direct.
More wins followed. By August of last year, the game had over 50,000 wishlists on Steam. A few weeks before the launch, a very simple tweet showing Lente on her boat and a short clip of the game in action went viral on X, earning 26,000 likes. And so it was probably no surprise that, when Spilled! finally launched last Wednesday, it immediately rocketed to the top of Steam’s coveted “New & Trending” chart.
Fate smiles this brightly on very few indie games. Of the 18,239 games that released on Steam last year, only 445 earned over 1,000 reviews—a common milestone for indie success on Steam. Why does the universe deal so few games a winning hand?
Fate’s reasons are rarely clear—something Lente knows well. She’s had her fair share of inexplicably bad luck too.
A nautical childhood
Lente’s current boat isn’t the first she’s lived on. “My parents bought a ship 5 years before I was born,” she says. For her entire early childhood, that boat was home.
“I had the best time growing up there,” Lente says. “It was in the middle of nature, next to a small town. I was playing outside all the time. And when my parents had to run the laundry or something and turned on the generator, me and my brother sometimes played CD-ROM and flash games on the old laptop (it was chunky).”
When her parents would tie-off on land, Lente and her brother built treehouses and played in the water. “The world was our garden,” she says.
Lente’s family lived in a small municipality outside of Amsterdam, where the rules for boat-living weren’t always totally clear. “Usually you pay a yearly fee to put your boat somewhere,” she explains. “There are spots where you're allowed to officially live, but also plenty of harbors where it's not officially allowed—but they don't really care. And then another option would be to roam around a lot. You can stay in most spots in nature for three days in a row. Either by anchor, or by some specially made poles created for recreational boaters.”
Lente recalls one early story about another seafaring neighbor who ran afoul of the local authorities. Next to the spot where her family usually anchored, there was “a big wooden ship,” she says. “It was from a guy that used to do weddings and stuff on it. But unfortunately taxes caught up to him and he was not able to care for the ship anymore. Eventually the ship sank and slowly the masts would fall over too. It looked pretty cool. Me and my brother always called it the pirate ship.”
It was a charmed childhood, but around the time Lente turned 9 or 10, her own family began to run into trouble themselves. “The municipality started acting a little strange,” she says. “They said we'd have to move the ship because we didn't have a license to live there.” This was “basically correct,” because her parents had simply purchased the ship itself and began living in the location where the boat had long been anchored.
Eventually, Lente says, the municipality pushed her family out. Her parents were forced to sell the ship, and took out a mortgage for a small apartment in town so Lente and her brother could continue attending the same school they’d grown up in.
“That was important to them,” Lente says. “Talking about this gets me a little teary eyed.”
Her parents engaged in a long legal struggle with the municipality, and after five years they won: “Turns out the ship had been there so long, that they never should have kicked us out,” she says. “We got a replacement spot somewhere else, and my parents got a mortgage for a houseboat. But to this day, the new spot is only a temporary license, and we for instance can't sell the place if we wanted to.”
Why do these things happen? One day, some faceless small-town bureaucrat decides that the family that’s been living in a local river for 15 years has got to go.
From the perspective of a 9-year-old child, it must have felt incomprehensible. You have to leave your home and go live on land like all the other kids. Why?
A childhood reclaimed
Spoilers for the ending of Spilled! follow.
Throughout Spilled! you’ll occasionally see an unnamed antagonist trawling the waters—a sloppy oil tanker that leaves behind a mess wherever it goes.
Who’s steering this boat, and why are they doing this? Don’t they know that people live here? Animals and humans alike are the victims of the villainous boat’s antics. And you have to clean up behind it.
In the game’s final chapter, you’re forced to face off against a supersized oil tanker. Using your boat’s water cannon, you can flood its decks and sink it to the bottom of the bay.
You never learn more about your silent antagonist’s reasons. The inner workings of the machine are inscrutable. As the last vestige of its damage is undone and it disappears beneath the waves, you’re left to wonder why it was so determined to cause all that trouble.
In the end, the machine’s motivations don’t really matter. All you know is that, despite the damage it dealt, you have the tools available to do something about it. You can reclaim the water. And with effort, you can turn your fortunes around.
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