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.
How I built a forward-compatible JSON save for Orchard Deck and migrated old saves automatically when the game was renamed from Apple Orchard. Round-trips verified.
How I designed the 84-card database in Orchard Deck with four orthogonal stats so a card can be rare but weak or common but fast, making every card a tradeoff.
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.
How I designed the campaign auto-battler in Orchard Deck. Eight combat keywords, six tribal synergies, a readable line of five cards, and replays that beat live control.
How I built the orchard in Orchard Deck around wall-clock growth and vitality that decays over nine harvests, turning worn-out cards into fuel instead of trash.
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.
How a slot-machine tech tree became the progression backbone of Orchard Deck. Three reels grow to five, jackpots arrive, and the odds visibly bend your way.
How the museum in Orchard Deck turns cards you donate into permanent production multipliers, and why a one-time sacrifice feels heavier than a repeatable cost.
Ten arcade minigames inside Orchard Deck without turning it into a grind. Entry fees, payouts, once-per-day rewards, and level gating that keeps them optional.
How I built breeding in Orchard Deck, where fusing two cards consumes both parents for a rarer child, and why the destructive cost is the point.
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.
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.
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.
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 added paid checkout to a SvelteKit app using Whop's embedded iframe, and why a verified server webhook, not the browser callback, grants access.
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.