16 games in the pipeline, 1 playable today: an honest state of the Dracon arcade
Most indie game pages show you a wall of logos and let you discover the emptiness yourself. We'd rather show you the pipeline. Our games catalog is a data file with 16 entries and an honest status field — this article is just what the data says today, plus why we run it this way.
The status ladder, defined
- Playable — a real game you can open and play to a win/lose state right now. Today that's exactly one: One Million Girlfriends.
- Demo — a working slice that proves the mechanic but isn't a full game. Four of these: torchlit-dungeon and the isometric/birds-eye engine demos, which double as our engine testbeds.
- WIP — actively being built. Three live here, including Hegemon (our strategy epic and the project's longest-running development saga) and Endless Tower Defense.
- Candidate — a real concept with real source, queued behind the active work. Six, including Junk Runner, Polis, Neonbreak, Darklord, and Deathrun.
- Template/placeholder — engine scaffolding that future games start from. Two.
Why publish the honest version
Two reasons. First, we learned from search data that thin pages don't just fail to rank — they get flagged. A 'game page' with no game behind it is exactly the kind of empty URL that poisons a domain's standing; when a game drops below playable, its play page comes out of the sitemap the same day, which is why you won't find dead links in the arcade. Second, our whole platform bet is that curation beats volume — a directory that says 'six candidates, not ready' earns the right to say 'this one is ready' and be believed.
What 'candidate to playable' means in practice
Every game in the catalog is desktop-only, built on our own engines (the demos above are those engines doing reps), and moves up the ladder only when it clears a quality floor — playable loop, real win/lose, no placeholder art pretending to be a game. We're now shipping through that pipeline deliberately: the current push takes candidates like Neonbreak, Darklord, and Endless Tower Defense toward playable, one quality gate at a time. The changelog records the moves as they happen, and this article gets regenerated whenever the catalog does — so the numbers above are a snapshot, not a permanent exhibit.