Deciding the whole game before building it

Somewhere along the way, a way of working took shape — and it is a little backwards from how software usually gets made.

Instead of starting with code and figuring out the game as it goes, each game gets decided in full first: every screen, every interaction, the words, the accessibility, and separately, all the engineering that makes it real. Only then does the building start. By the time a game is being built, the hard questions already have answers, so the work is about craft, not about rediscovering what the thing is supposed to be.

It sounds strict, and it is. But it is also why these games can be small and still feel complete — and why a single developer can take on a whole catalog without cutting corners. (There is a longer write-up about this in the Articles section.)