Notes from a studio of one

Devlog

Build notes, half-finished ideas, and my figuring out how games should look and feel.

2026 · 07 · 11

A built a great game that i can't ship

I built a verbatim copy of a tabletop word game my wife and I love so we could play it on the road. It works, we still play it, and I'll never sell it, because the design isn't mine. What I tried, why it didn't work, and how it turned into Have Words anyway.

2026 · 06 · 17

"Have Words" wasn't always the game's name

I named my game. I named it again. Then I named it a third time, and this time I checked the stuff I should have checked first. A short story about learning the difference between a name being available and a name being yours, the expensive way.

2026 · 06 · 08

The gameboard is the score

I went to MoMA, got obsessed with the big flat blocks of color on the walls, and came home wanting my word game to look like that. Then I had to decide what the blocks actually were. Here's how the score ended up being the background.