Can Fabrika is a one-person indie game studio. The name is Turkish for "Can's factory": a small factory with hearts coming out of the chimney. I make mobile games for iPhone and Android, and right now three of them are in development at the same time. People reasonably ask how that works without everything falling apart.
This post is the honest answer: how the studio is organised, the rules that keep scope under control, why privacy is a default rather than a feature, and a short introduction to the game I have written least about so far, Whisker Hollow.
Two production lines
The games come off two lines, and each line has its own rhythm.
- The pixel line makes pixel-art tycoon and management games you can watch for hours. Paw & Sword, an idle hunting-town tycoon, and Whisker Hollow, a cozy town and dungeon manager, both come from here.
- The party line makes games you play with friends on your phones. REZİL, a 16+ party card game in ten languages, is the first.
The lines are very different kinds of work. Pixel games are mostly systems and art: economy curves, animation strips, boss fights. Party games are mostly writing and feel: card decks, round flow and the small rules that keep a table laughing. Switching between them is tiring, but it also helps. When I am stuck on a balance curve, writing cards is a rest, and the other way round.
Scope rules for one person
With one person, the scarcest resource is attention, not ideas. A few rules keep the projects finishable:
- One engine, shared habits. Every game is built in Unity. Tools, scripts and conventions move from one project to the next.
- Logic separate from graphics. In Paw & Sword, the game rules run as a simulation that can be tested without drawing anything. That is what makes balancing with bot players possible.
- Scripts instead of hand work. Anything repeated hundreds of times, like cutting and aligning sprite frames, is done by a script that refuses bad input. I wrote about that in the 8-frame sheet rule.
- Say no to the second version of a feature. Offline first, one launch language for Paw & Sword, one clear rule set for REZİL. Extras come after a game works.
Privacy by default
Mobile games make money from purchases and ads, and mine do too. But I want them to be the kind of games I would let a friend install without a warning. So a few things are defaults across the studio:
- An age screen before the game starts where it matters, with rules that follow from the answer.
- Consent before personalised ads. You are asked first, and you can change your mind later in the game's privacy settings.
- A delete-data page for every game, so removing your data does not need a support email. Each game also has its own privacy policy and support page on this site.
- No ads in the middle of play where it would spoil the moment. In REZİL, ads are designed to appear between games, never during a round.
None of this is unusual on its own. Doing it the same way in every game means players learn once how things work at Can Fabrika.
One website, one intro, one voice
All the games share one studio website, this one, in nine languages: English, Turkish, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Brazilian Portuguese. Game pages, support, privacy policies, delete-data pages and the press kit all live here. For a small studio, one place to update beats five half-maintained sites.
The same thinking applies inside the games. Every game opens with the same short Can Fabrika intro and logo, so the studio is recognisable across very different genres. The devlog you are reading is part of that too: one place where the work is explained in plain language.
I also tell stories in Turkish on YouTube, on my channel Kendi Kendime Hikayeler. It is a different craft, but it taught me a lot about pacing and about explaining things simply.
Meet Whisker Hollow
Whisker Hollow, which used to be called HeroHaven, is the calm one. It is a cozy management game about a little town of cat heroes: you build homes, shops and guild halls, send your heroes into dungeons and watch the town grow around them. The pacing is relaxed on purpose. Where Paw & Sword is about walls and big boss fights, Whisker Hollow is about tending a place you like.
It shares the cat-hero world with Paw & Sword but is its own game. The focus is on iPhone first, with Android to follow. The planned first iPhone version plays as a guest, offline, with local saves, and without ads, subscriptions or account sign-in. It is still in testing and not yet publicly available. More about it soon on the Whisker Hollow page.
