Design notes, making-of stories, and the occasional strong opinion about the state of casual gaming — straight from the person building the site.
· 11 min read
Claude Opus 5.5 could not turn concept art into a 3D character at all. What it could do, and Astra could not, was take an existing Meshy model, rig it and make it walk, blink and speak.
Read the post →· 16 min read
Ka'Zhurn: The Unbinding tells the story of the Inkborne novel as a mobile-friendly action RPG, with no in-app purchases and no intrusive ads. Two years in, AI is turning weeks of work into hours. Meshy made its models, and Claude Opus 5.5 gave the farmer a new animation and cut him from 34,687 triangles to 5,000 for phones.
Read the post →· 6 min read
Bulwark 2 is available for Android. Move your archers across three lanes, grow your squad, and take on a 21-level campaign with a boss in every stage.
Read the post →· 6 min read
Geometry Survivor is on Google Play. Steer through the swarm, draft an automatic weapon build, and develop your character between runs. No video ads.
Read the post →· 6 min read
Download Defend the Dune for Android. Build towers, recruit defenders, and work through a 101-wave desert campaign with earned upgrades and no video ads.
Read the post →· 11 min read
A working blockout, a jacket that fell apart in motion, and a long effort to match Aelar's face. What Astra achieved in Blender, where it struggled, and why I'm pausing the demo.
Read the post →· 7 min read
Download Fruit Alchemist on Google Play, find three more Legitsauce Android releases, and read Phil's commitment: no video ads while he owns the company.
Read the post →· 11 min read
After procedural monsters, Blender MCP, melted geometry and Meshy experiments, I gave Astra my most demanding 3D project yet: a cinematic space exploration and survival game.
Read the post →· 9 min read
A closer look at refining Cosmic: Alliance's captain with Astra and Blender, from the model in my first post to the face taking shape now.
Read the post →· 5 min read
Our original preview of Fruit Alchemist on Android, now updated with the public Google Play link and the September 8 release announcement.
Read the post →· 7 min read
Hold the Keep sold five copies on Steam and got no reviews. Here is why I rebuilt it into Yours Truly, The Warlord: a fairer difficulty curve, online co-op, AoE2-style trade routes, and a rework of the art.
Read the post →· 9 min read
The Pocket Racers tracks used to be flat. Now they climb, cross over themselves, launch you off ledges, and the rivals ram you back on hard mode. A devlog on the levels overhaul.
Read the post →· 8 min read
Marble Skyway's biggest update: forty levels across two worlds, rebuilt on ramps and momentum, plus a one-screen level select you can thumb through with one hand.
Read the post →· 7 min read
Kamikaze Drone Defense is a new first-person survival shooter I'm testing internally right now. You ride the open bed of a fleeing jeep and shoot drones out of the sky before they reach you. It grew out of real war footage, and I wanted to bottle one specific kind of dread and make it playable.
Read the post →· 8 min read
A progress update on rebuilding Crawl of the Forsaken's bestiary as signed distance fields. The bosses and the robed casters are converted now, and this time every before-and-after is shot through the real gameplay camera instead of a flattering studio angle.
Read the post →· 14 min read
The Crawl of the Forsaken bestiary got rebuilt on signed distance fields: continuous creature bodies sculpted in code, baked down to tiny mobile-friendly meshes, and iterated on by Claude Opus 4.8 and Fable reading their own renders. A close look at the pipeline and the performance math.
Read the post →· 6 min read
The Spy Below is a low-poly spy shooter played for laughs, built in Godot with Claude Opus 4.8. Here's where it came from and where it's going.
Read the post →· 7 min read
Inkborne is a new interactive-novel platform I've been building on top of Ink and a lot of custom code. First story out the gate: Ka'Zhurn: Soil and Blood. Here's what it is and how it gets made.
Read the post →· 7 min read
Modern casual games are engineered to waste your time and drain your wallet: energy timers, forced video ads, and currency that hides the price. Here's the anatomy of the con, and the alternative.
Read the post →· 4 min read
Tower Onslaught started with the game that put tower defense in the browser — Desktop Tower Defense. Here's what we kept, what we changed, and why.
Read the post →· 3 min read
Pocket Racers started from one goal: a silly, physics-driven toy-car racer that's fun whether you want clean racing lines or glorious tabletop chaos.
Read the post →· 4 min read
Helix Drop was designed backwards from a single constraint: be worth opening for two minutes on a standing train, one thumb, no sound, no tutorial.
Read the post →· 4 min read
Design notes on Geometry Survivor: what we borrowed from Vampire Survivors and Brotato, why movement is the only input, and the strategies that actually work.
Read the post →· 4 min read
How Crawl of the Forsaken was built: Fate's cozy dungeon loop meets Lufia II's Ancient Cave, with every monster modeled procedurally in code so the whole crawler streams into a browser tab.
Read the post →· 5 min read
How Siege of Ages was designed: HoMM3's army-building itch crossed with idle-game pacing, seven historical ages, GPT-generated art, and Claude-written code.
Read the post →· 4 min read
The five-minute time-killer turned into a slot machine. Here's why I built a free, mobile-friendly browser-game site with no paywalls and no video ads.
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