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.
When you play a star out of his natural role, World 11 docks him. Here is how I turned the fuzzy sense that a winger is wasted at fullback into a rating system.
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 team strength becomes chances and chances become goals in World 11. Building a probability model that produces believable scorelines and the occasional upset.
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.
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.
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.
How a single content engine scans Markdown-on-disk blogs and Postgres-backed blogs behind one pluggable scanner interface, driven by YAML config instead of code.
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.
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.
A recipe-driven Playwright engine that submits one product to many directory sites by modeling the form pattern, not the site, with explicit success detection.
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.
How to orchestrate a large generation or audit job across parallel AI agents with adversarial verification and looping quality gates, instead of trusting one giant prompt.
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.
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.