How I make games
Falò Games is me: one developer, more than 25 years of writing code, and a family that keeps asking for games. Here's the whole recipe: the honest version of how they get made, and the tools that make it possible.
I've wanted to make games for as long as I've been coding. Two things kept stopping me: time, and drawing. Code I can do. I've spent a quarter of a century building interfaces, APIs and backends. But my drawings are like pizza with pineapple: technically possible, still an abomination.
AI tools changed that. They don't come up with the games. They help me make art, music and sound I could never make on my own, and they help me write code faster in the few hours I have. So the games I used to only talk about are finally getting finished.
Design meetings
The kids pitch their ideas to it in voice mode, and it listens with infinite patience, even to the fourth version of the same pitch. Then I take over and have it write the game design up as a Markdown file I can build from. It also turns sketches into reference art, and it painted the watercolour boards for Avery's Forest Adventure.
Where it started
Apple's own 2D game framework, and what the first games are built with. Lovely on iPhone and iPad, but it doesn't travel: like mozzarella di bufala, best enjoyed where it's made. That's why the games out now are iOS only.
The new engine
Free, open source, and it never asks for royalties, which helps when a game sells three copies and two of them go to la famiglia. I moved to it from SpriteKit because one project exports to iOS, Android and desktop, which makes Google Play and Steam realistic for a one-person studio.
The editor
Where the code gets written, and where most of my evenings go. Like a moka pot: simple, reliable, and on every single day.
AI pair programmer
It types faster than I do and never needs an espresso. I decide what gets built and how, and nothing ships until I've tasted it, like nonna checking the sugo before it reaches the table.
Art from sketches
Turns my dodgy sketches, and my kids' much better ones, into art that doesn't make people pinch their fingers and ask “ma che cos'è?” (what on earth is that?).
Pixel art and sprites
For when a game needs pixel art and I need a miracle. Characters, sprites and animation frames, placed with the patience of someone folding tortellini by hand. I do not have that patience.
Animation by hand
A free, open-source pixel art editor, built with Godot, no less. It's where I animated sprites almost by hand after PixelLab turned one of my characters into the Hulk.
The art assistant
Claude's desktop agent. In a recent Fart Me To The Moon update it drove the PixelLab tools for me, and the animations came out much smoother. Nobody turned green.
Music
Theme tunes and background music, like the very relaxed soundtrack of Avery's Forest Adventure. The opera gene skipped me, and nobody needs to hear me sing. Now nobody has to.
Voices and effects
Voices and sound effects, so I don't have to record them myself. Otherwise every character would talk with their hands, and you can't hear that. It also made the chiptune music in Fart Me To The Moon.
My own art pipeline
Fucina is Italian for forge, and it's my own internal pipeline, built in Laravel (of course). It sends each job to the right tool, whether that's ComfyUI, PixelLab, Scenario or ElevenLabs, keeps every version, waits for my approval, and exports the results straight into Godot or SpriteKit. Claude Code can drive it too. Yes, a studio called Bonfire has a pipeline called Forge. I may have a theme.
Runs at home
Node-based image generation that runs on my own machine, driven through Fucina, which can even pull models from Civitai and Hugging Face straight into it. No cloud bill, just a very warm graphics card.
My own backends
I use it every day anyway, so when a game needs an API or an online service, I build my own instead of renting one. It's my carbonara: I can make it with my eyes closed, and I follow the rules (no cream, ever).
Assolutamente no. Between software licences, developer accounts and store fees, making games costs me more than it earns. Even with free-to-play, AdMob ads and the odd in-app purchase all pulling together, the dream is modest: enough for a gelato with my wife and kids now and then.
That's not why I do it anyway. The best part is watching family and friends play something I made, and hearing the kids tell me what the next one should be.
I started with SpriteKit, which is why the games out now are iOS only. The new ones are built in Godot, so Android and Steam are next, with slightly bigger games.