Yes, It’s Called Growing My Manhole and The Story Behind It

Source: Steam

Some games earn your attention through stunning visuals or a gripping story. GROWING MY MANHOLE earns it with just 3 words and a raised eyebrow.

Yes, that’s the actual name. And no, it’s not an accident. GROWING MY MANHOLE is a casual incremental game developed by SylverDev, published under Gearbyte Games. The premise is simple, literal, and completely committed to the bit. What you see is what you get, and that’s precisely the point.

In the game, you start as a small, insignificant manhole that consumes everything in its path, and grows until it has swallowed the entire universe. 

I managed to get my hands on the demo at Indie Jam 2026. Whatever that was happening in the background at the time, I’ll never know. The moment the manhole started moving, everything else faded out.

The game mechanics, simple.

The sound design, magnetic.

Think of it like a vacuum, but the more you consume, the more intense the sound gets, bordering on ASMR. One round for me turned into ten. Next thing I know, I finished the demo in one sitting, the whole time thinking: just one more round.

Behind the name is a developer who will openly tell you the game started as a joke. The gameplay came second.

And somehow, that’s exactly what makes it work.

A Game Born from a Shower Thought

Every game starts with a spark of an idea — perhaps not a grand vision or an entire design brief, but something small enough to build on. For SylverDev, that spark came in the shower.

GROWING MY MANHOLE didn’t begin with a gameplay concept. It began with a name. “I just had a shower thought and thought a Steam game name with GROWING MY MANHOLE would be funny.” He bought the Steam app for the name before a single mechanic existed. The gameplay? That came after. 

What started as a joke quickly became something SylverDev took seriously. Specifically, on how the game should feel in your hands.

TESSR: What kind of moment-to-moment experience do you want players to have?

SylverDev: Hopefully, I want players to feel the dopamine of feeling progress and numbers going up. Also get the sense of satisfaction from consuming a lot of items — so I spent more time on the game's feedback and game juice.

For someone who started with a punchline, SylverDev turned out to care quite deeply about the craft. That dopamine loop doesn’t happen by accident. Behind it is a deliberate effort to keep players engaged at just the right pace, introducing new elements before boredom has a chance to set in. The joke had a soul and SylverDev found it.

Source: Steam

Back to Basics and Keeping the Dream

Playing the demo at Indie Jam 2026, the experience felt effortless. It's as if the game already knew exactly what it wanted to be. After hearing from SylverDev about what went on behind-the-scenes, that ease was hard won.

What feels instinctive to the player took deliberate, sometimes difficult decisions to get there. Before it became the smooth, consuming loop that had me glued to the demo booth, GROWING MY MANHOLE went through a version that felt nothing like it. 

TESSR: What gameplay systems or ideas did you decide to leave out, and what influenced those decisions? 

SylverDev: Initially, when you're in close proximity to an object larger than your size, it can be ‘mined’ using a shockwave that will take about 3 hits to destroy. These allowed you to break larger objects into smaller ones for you to swallow. I also made it so that if you got too close to these larger objects, they would instantly choke you and end your run. }All these were removed because the gameplay just felt generally too tedious and frustrating. I wanted to make players turn off their brain and go into that state of being brain-dead — just spacing out and clearing stuff on the screen like a chill game.

Sometimes the best design decision is knowing what to keep, what to leave, and what actually matters. For SylverDev, stripping back the complexity wasn’t a compromise but the whole point. 

But design decisions weren’t the only tough calls being made at the time of development. GROWING MY MANHOLE wasn’t SylverDev’s only project. He had been juggling its development alongside another published game, Identifile. 

TESSR: What’s been a tough decision or trade-off you’ve had to make while making the game? 

SylverDev: I've been working on both Identifile and GROWING MY MANHOLE at the same time, so I guess it's just difficult to work on 2 projects. Identifile did not generate enough income for the both of us to continue full-time, so we separated. My partner went to work full-time while I continued doing indie games full-time. I have to make another game and hope to earn enough to continue my indie game journey. 

Source: Steam

What Started as a Joke, Ends in a Memory

SylverDev didn’t set out to make something meaningful. It started with a laugh, and from that, a game was born. His goal was to make something fun with a name that would make people do a double take. Somewhere along the way, it became both. 

TESSR: After the players finished playing the game, what do you want them to walk away feeling? 

SylverDev: I want them to feel powerful like a god at the end of the game, leaving the players feeling satisfied after finishing the game, and the time spent on it was worth it. Leave the experience so memorable that players can't help but talk about it and telling others to try the game out. I just want to make them feel great after playing it.

GROWING MY MANHOLE is on Steam. Try the demo yourself and tell a friend! I really enjoyed it, so I think you will too.

Author Bio

Alison Chai is a marketer at TESSR, an artist, and a gaming creator with a finance background. She enjoys exploring the intersections of creative work, structure, and mental well-being. Drawn to the idea of "organised chaos”, she believes that the right systems can elevate creative expression rather than limit it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.