Charlie Cleveland is a young independent game developer in San Francisco. He spent years leading a team developing a Half-Life 2 mod called Natural Selection. He actually made enough money from donations to work full time on the project, but not enough money to develop his more ambitious game designs.

So what's a young independent game designer to do? Charlie took a few months to develop a casual game - hoping that the larger market and royalties will help fuel his ideas for first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. Voila: Zen of Sudoku. Charlie is transparent about the process. It's refreshing to see how someone works hard at driving his game developer dreams.