Game design
Why the games work the way they do: core loops, progression, balance, difficulty and the playtests that changed them.
- Game design
Idle Fishing Empire: a generational fishing tycoon with a moral fork and no time gates
Designing Idle Fishing Empire: heirs across generations, sustainable vs destructive fishing, logistic fish stocks, five endings, human-cadence sims, and no time gates.
- Game design
Revisiting Genesis: giving an idle game an ending and finally shipping it
How I un-parked my idle game: fixed scope with an ending, a simulator that plays like a human, value pricing, and a privacy-policy rejection on release day.
- Game design
Wordhoard: designing a word roguelike that isn't 'Balatro with letters'
Wordhoard, a word roguelike in an illuminated manuscript: rarity from word frequency, a broken charm combo the sim missed, and sounds that weren't gunshots.
- Game design
Minesweeper Rogue: a no-guess minesweeper roguelike where the rules change what numbers mean
Designing Minesweeper Rogue: tunnels, stacking rules like liar and knight numbers, a solver that keeps every level no-guess, fuses that count digs, and phone-only bugs.
- Game design
Backpack Battle: balancing an autobattler so no class beats every other class
Balancing Backpack Battle, an inventory autobattler: a class-vs-class sim matrix, survivorship bias in balance tests, a counter triangle, first-fight fairness.
- Game design
Emberfall: making a retro offline JRPG with a story, five chapters and a 99-cent unlock
Emberfall is a retro turn-based JRPG with a real ending. Why a Kemco-style RPG, the story, Auto battle for older players, and pricing chapters at $0.99 or two videos.
- Game design
Tavern Heroes: building an offline idle RPG, and abandoning a painted town after three attempts
The design of Tavern Heroes, a Soda Dungeon-style idle RPG with no gacha: missions, retirement for Renown, a sim before art, and why the game became menu-only.
- Game design
Sovereign: building a polished no-guess Queens puzzle, and launching it with a paid ads test
How Sovereign generates Queens logic puzzles that never need a guess, its six modes and async replay races, and why its launch is a deliberate paid-ads experiment.
- Game design
Balancing an idle game with a simulator (and the month my bot cheated)
How Genesis is balanced by a headless simulator and an auto-tuner, the bugs that made the bot a player who couldn't exist, and why the sim must play like a human.
- Game design
Genesis: designing an idle game about the evolution of life
The design of Genesis, an incremental idle game: an 8-tier producer cascade, a DNA strand prestige layer, crucibles built to be failed first, and three chapters.
- Game design
Word Slide and Word Push: inventing a word puzzle, and the playtest that said it was far too hard
Two word puzzles built on the Loopover row-and-column slide. Generating 2,000 levels with exact par, why a solver's par says nothing about humans, and naming.
- Game design
Bible Word Search: a themed fork in two hours, Bible translation licensing, and curating 30,000 verses
Building Bible Word Search from the Word Search engine. Why not the NIV, verse-based levels, a Whole Bible mode, content ratings, and which ad categories to block.
- Game design
Spider Solitaire for Android: free undo, a bot that plays 800 games, and why landscape didn't help
Designing a Spider Solitaire app on a shared engine. Why undo is free, how 800 bot games test the rules, and what landscape mode really changes on phones.
