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.
Each of World 11's eleven shapes is a list of slots in JSON. Here is how data-driven formations power a visual shape picker and change how every draft plays.
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.
I keep my games small on purpose. Here is what shipping little, finished, free browser games in Godot, instead of chasing one big dream project, has taught me about scope, momentum, and actually finishing.
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.
Both of my games keep their content and balance in JSON files, not GDScript. Here is why pushing formations, ratings, economy, and difficulty into data made them faster to tune and safer to change.
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.
How I export a Godot 4 game to HTML5, host the build on object storage, embed it on my site, and replace the default Godot loading logo with my own. The practical web-shipping checklist I wish I had.
An honest case for Godot 4 as a solo developer, from shipping two free browser games. Free with no revenue share, GDScript, native web export, and the real trade offs.
Same-nation and same-decade bonuses make World 11 a real draft. Here is how chemistry sets up the tug of war between the obvious star and the player who fits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A pure deterministic seeded simulation with no node dependencies turned a roguelike into something testable, with daily challenges and shareable links and no backend.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone says solo game dev is impossible. Then you look at Stardew Valley. Here's the realistic breakdown of building games alone in 2025.