Studio journal

Design notes & behind‑the‑scenes.

Updated roughly once a month. Design notes, postmortems, and occasional thoughts on what cognitive games could be.

DesignMay 12, 20266 min read

Why we ship 30 great levels instead of 200 mediocre ones.

Volume is easy. Quality is hard. Here's how we decide when a level is done — and why we delete more than we ship.

Why we hired a linguist, what makes a word "fair", and the surprisingly emotional process of choosing which words deserve to be in a game.

We expected to work smarter. We didn't expect it to change how we think about the games themselves.

Every tap in Crux makes a sound. Here's how we tuned 80 audio cues to feel satisfying without becoming noise.

The conventional wisdom says you need paid acquisition to launch a mobile game. We ignored it. The results surprised us.

An honest look at the six months between Luma's first commit and its App Store launch. Including the part where we nearly scrapped the whole thing.

Roughly once a month. No spam, no marketing. Just studio notes.