Building 0n1 in public · notes & how-tos
The story behind 0n1 Studios — what I’m building, why, and how. Part devlog, part how-to. No tracking and no newsletter wall; just an RSS feed if you want to follow along.
I went on holiday with three games and came back with a fourth, because someone whose opinion I value didn't like any of the three. Runoff is what happens when your harshest reviewer shares a kitchen table with you for two weeks.
For two weeks I reviewed screens I hadn't drawn, in sentences like "the badge in the top-right of the second panel — no, the other second panel." Position is the feedback, and prose is a terrible way to carry it. So I built a board you stick notes on, and I've put it on GitHub.
The site has a chat button now. It's an AI, it says so, and it is not allowed to know anything about the games that isn't written on a page it just read. Why a one-person studio with one shipped game built a front desk, and the cache mistake you only find out about on the bill.
I once wrote that I have more game ideas than evenings. My fix was to run eight things per evening, which worked right up until I couldn't remember which window was which. What the research says about that, why the bottleneck was never the agents, and the dashboard I built instead of simply closing some tabs.
An AI will build a game the moment you ask — the question is whose game. Before the core loop, before the GDD, there's one word that decides everything downstream: the type. Here's why naming the genre first is the cheapest, highest-leverage decision you can make — and a 3D atlas of the types to steal from.
A game studio usually shows you its games. The other half of what gets built here is the toolchain that builds them — twelve studio-made AI tools that generate the art, post the dailies, run the releases and remember the lessons. The new Workshop page is that team made visible — commit activity and all, honestly, and without a single thing to sell you.
I renamed my quote puzzle — not because the old name was wrong, but because it was crowded. "Letterbox" is a film site, a mail slot, an aspect ratio, and a hiking hobby before it's ever my game, and I got tired of searching for my own app and finding everyone else. Meet LineBy — same game, same one-time purchase, a name you can actually find.
Two games changed shape this month. LineBy went freemium with a free daily puzzle, and a one-time library that now grows every day. Worldwright is expanding past the phone with a Unity rebuild that adds desktop and Android while staying on iOS. Why I moved both, and the render-free core that made the rewrite cheap.
Building the game is the fun part. Getting one stranger to notice it is the hard part nobody warns you about. No formula — just table stakes: be findable, show up, and beg your friends. Notes from the cornfield.
An idea isn't a game — it's a mood. A game begins the moment you write the mechanics down. Here's why every repo I touch has a plain gdd.md, and why it matters twice as much when an AI is building with you.
I make small iOS games on my own. This is where I write down how it's going, how bits of it work, and the things I got wrong along the way.