Honest accounting of a game with no monetization. What it actually costs, your nights, a free engine, free hosting, and what you actually get back from shipping it.
Why a solo developer should ship free browser games at all. A portfolio, a funnel, a reason for a stranger to click your name, and the leverage of link not download.
Scoping a solo game so you ship it. The feature complete vertical slice, cutting scope without guilt, the endless systems trap, and knowing when a game is done enough.
Tauri gives you a small cross-platform desktop app with a Rust core and a native webview. The hard part is not the code, it is signing, notarization, and CI.
A balance bot runs hundreds of optimal teams through the full gauntlet and reports the champion rate. That dial replaced the playtest team a solo developer does not have.
I have no QA team, so I built a headless smoke suite in Godot that instances every scene, round trips saves, sweeps 300 battle seeds, and enumerates the slot odds.
All of World 11's balance lives in data files. Tuning the difficulty means editing JSON and rerunning, never touching the simulation. Here is why that split matters.
I built a small content registry that scans every blog and verifies each post is actually reachable and in the sitemap, not just marked published in a row somewhere.
A practical guide to exporting a Godot 4 game to HTML5 and WebAssembly, hosting it on Cloudflare R2, embedding it in a page, and the COOP and COEP thread gotcha.
Facts are not copyrightable. Here is the practical line a solo developer can walk to ship a game using real names, positions, and years, with freely licensed faces.
Orchard Deck has six interlocking systems where every output feeds another input. Here is how I designed slots, orchard, museum, lab, breeding, and campaign to feel deep.
A pure deterministic seeded simulation with no node dependencies turned a roguelike into something testable, with daily challenges and shareable links and no backend.
Agentic AI coding gives real leverage only when you decompose work, isolate it, anchor it with durable context, and verify the output. Here is how I direct it.
Orchard Deck is built around a slot machine, but there are no purchases and one in-game currency. Here is how I designed the odds to reward players without exploiting them.
How I scoped and shipped a searchable AI and SaaS tool directory solo. Search as the core UX, original long-form content as the moat.
World 11 is a World Cup draft roguelike built solo in Godot 4. Spin a nation and year, draft real legends, and sim a fourteen match gauntlet.
Orchard Deck is a complete cozy collectathon built solo in Godot 4 and shipped as a free browser game. Here is the stack, the systems, and why a web build changed everything.