Thirty Flights of Loving was developed as part of the Kickstarter campaign for the revival of the Idle Thumbs podcast and included a free copy of its predecessor.

The game employs a modified version of id Software's 1997-era Quake II engine and incorporates music composed by Idle Thumbs member Chris Remo.

[3] Unlike Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving employs non-linear storytelling, forcing the player to piece together the narrative.

[3] Thirty Flights of Loving begins with the player walking through a small corridor where individual gameplay elements such as movement and key allocations are explained.

A smash cut skips the narrative forward to a scene with Anita and Borges lying shot in a room full of crates.

Chung, who worked as a level designer for Pandemic Studios, has contributed to the development of Full Spectrum Warrior and Lord of the Rings: Conquest.

"[5] The source code of Thirty Flights of Loving itself has been released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License, making it free software.

Chung brought multiple existing assets from Gravity Bone to develop Thirty Flights of Loving,[4] and used a diverse set of tools to create the elements of the game.

[7] Chung included a system to automate the generation of non-playable characters to replace the process of manually scripting every person in the game.

[7] On the Tone Control podcast, he spoke about how every game he has produced, including Thirty Flights of Loving, takes place in the same shared universe.

[7] It incorporates music composed by Idle Thumbs member Chris Remo,[10] while additional audio was provided by Jared Emerson-Johnson and A.J.

[14][15] The game, alongside a free copy of Gravity Bone, was made available to early supporters in July 2012 and to the general public a month later via Steam.

"[19] GameSpot's Carolyn Petit wrote that "the pleasure of Thirty Flights of Loving emerges from the things left unshown", allowing the player to infer and imagine the events, such as the heist itself, that are not otherwise shown.

[22] Graham Smith of PC Gamer extolled the minimalist storytelling, asserting that Thirty Flights of Loving "tells a better story in 13 minutes than most games do in 13 hours".

[1] Mark Brown from Wired UK classified the game as a "brassy, super-short, cubic heist drama," and stated that Chung "spins a memorable yarn, delivers it with confidence and panache [...] with a 15-year-old engine, without voice acting, in 20 minutes.

"[23] IGN's Nathan Meunier said the game "gets off to a fascinating start before completely throwing any and all expectations you might form during its first few minutes into the wood chipper.

"[21] British video game magazine Edge found Thirty Flights of Loving to be "an intriguing psychological thriller that feels like Wes Anderson taking on Hitchcock.

"[20] The magazine added that the game had a "wonderfully ambiguous" story, crafted by replacing dialogue with "artful framing and shrewd gestures, and booting out cutscenes in favour of prickly jump-cuts.