Insights on solo development, AI tools, and building digital products as an independent developer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.