Why I'm building Paw & Sword
What Evil Hunter Tycoon got right, what I want to make bigger, and why watching the battles is the real game.
Devlog · 12 posts
Devlog: notes from the factory
How the games are designed, balanced, drawn and written. Honest notes from a one-person studio, including the parts that did not work the first time.
One cat per class: designing 45 hero classes that stay recognisable
45 classes, 7 rank looks each, and one rule that keeps every hero recognisable from Normal to Mythic.
Teaching pixel cats to walk in 8 directions
Why side-view heroes felt wrong, how five drawn views and some mirroring give eight directions, and the traps in flipping sprites.
Keeping sprite animations consistent: the 8-frame sheet rule
Sheets of exactly eight frames, feet on one line, no size pops and an eye-colour check: the boring rules that keep hundreds of animations clean.
Balancing an idle tycoon with bot players
Four bot profiles, a simulated month of play in a few minutes, and the problems they found before any human tester did.
The mid-game gold problem and how Hero Training fixed it
Gold was piling up with nothing to buy. Here is how a training feature with an escalating daily price gave it a job without breaking the boss walls.
Boss walls, the Boss Horn and losing fairly
Some bosses are meant to stop you for a while. The trick is making a loss feel like information, not punishment.
Rare heroes on purpose: summons, pity timers and why heroes never leave
Rarity makes moments. A pity timer keeps the worst case known, and a no-leaving rule keeps the heroes you love.
Writing REZİL in 10 languages, from scratch
A translated joke keeps its meaning and loses its punch. Why every REZİL deck is written from scratch in its own language.
Inside a REZİL deck: what makes a card funny
Two prompt shapes that work, four kinds of answer that win, and how the expat and office decks are put together.
Small rules, big laughs: REZİL's scoring and the cut reverse round
Why a worst-answer-wins round was cut, how points and Crowd Pick work, and why party rules should fit in one sentence.
One indie studio, three games: how Can Fabrika works
Two production lines, one set of tools, privacy-first defaults and one website for everything. Plus a short introduction to Whisker Hollow.
The door is open
Players, press, publishers and collabs: all welcome.