Orchard Deck is a cozy collectathon with no purchases and no dark patterns. Here is how I paced an idle game with overlapping clocks so there is always one small thing worth doing, without ever nagging the player.
A deterministic, seeded simulation gave my draft game a daily challenge and shareable challenge links for free, with no backend at all. Here is how a single integer unlocks both.
World 11 is a football game with no passing, shooting, or defending. You draft a team and watch the result. Here is why a game about betting instead of playing is so addictive, and how the draft loop works.
My draft roguelike was too easy. A strong team won the cup two-thirds of the time, so winning meant nothing. Here is how I stopped guessing and tuned it to a real one-in-three with a few hundred simulated runs.
I wanted real footballer photos on the cards in my draft game, free-licensed only. The fetch was easy. Not shipping the philosopher Socrates instead of the footballer was the hard part. Here is the pipeline and the disambiguation fix.
Players draft the team but never play the match, so the simulation has to feel fair. Here is the possession-and-event model behind World 11, why it is deterministic from a single seed, and what that buys you for free.
Everyone says solo game dev is impossible. Then you look at Stardew Valley. Here's the realistic breakdown of building games alone in 2025.