Brief
I describe the game in plain English: the feel, the rules, who it's for and what "good" means.
Side lab / SUMAR_TECH studio
Ten games. Forty-eight days.
One human.
It started as an experiment: ten original games taken to Google Play between 13 September and 31 October 2026, directed through AI agents. The studio has kept shipping since. Today there are 10 games on Google Play, and this list updates itself from Play every day.
Stack DropOne-thumb tower
Rope SwingSwing and let go
Tick TownKids learn the clock
Dribble HomeTwo-thumb football
Spell CraneWords meet physics
Paperwind3D canyon flyer
Summit Haul3D cargo hill climb
MislaidHidden objects, no image files
Paint PanicCouch battle, phones as pads
SparkbloomFireworks picture puzzle
How a game gets made
Build
Agents write the code, the art in code, the sound and the store listing, following the studio's playbooks.
Break it
I play it on a real phone and a slow Android TV over adb, and send back what feels wrong.
Ship
Play listing, in-app purchases, ads and Android TV, then short promo clips that post themselves daily.
What the agents do
- Draft the code, tests, store listings and daily promo clips
- Follow playbooks I wrote and keep improving: TV checklists, in-app purchase setup, release routines
- Remember what we learned, across every game
What I own
- What's worth building, and the quality bar: no filler, no ad spam
- Testing on a real phone and a real, slow TV, over adb
- Every decision that can't be undone: what ships, what gets spent, what goes public
What machines won't tell you: an Xbox controller on Google TV quietly loses its triggers through the browser's Gamepad API, and the Haier TV's remote arrows disappear the moment a game polls for gamepads. You only find that on the hardware. I wrote a native bridge, and then a checklist so no agent makes the mistake again.
Playbooks, not prompts
Every lesson becomes a written playbook that agents follow on the next game, so a mistake only happens once. Never twice applies here too.
- Android TVDetection, remote and controller input, picture settings for slow TVs, and a crash guard for ads
- PurchasesOne-time unlocks people actually want, restore and offline handling, and the Play Console steps in order
- FeelNever lock the frame rate, pause and mute when the app leaves the screen, and controls a resting thumb can reach
- GrowthA weekly check against retention gates: no paid ads until a game earns them
The studio is growing: other developers now publish games through it, using the same playbooks, which is why the list above can include games I didn't build myself.
Back to the main work
The day job is backends
that can't fail.
The studio is where I test how far directing agents can go. The portfolio is the ten years of production systems that taught me what to check.