Workbench re-sorted: two new projects, two paused, and why the last ten percent take so long

22 August to 11 October 2026:

In seven weeks more ideas became games than a one-person studio can finish. This entry sorts them: what is new on the workbench, what is resting, and what changed along the way.

Why there is suddenly more

Next to a job and a family, the plan was for a long time: one big game and a few small apps. Since spring, what one person can get done in a week has shifted. Planning, checking, test tools, and reading through documents and image material are much faster with today's AI tools. That is why two large projects got as far as they did in a few weeks.

It is also the problem. Building faster does not mean finishing faster. The last ten percent consist of device tests, store listings and bugs you only see on a phone, and building faster does nothing for those.

New on the workbench: HotBiz

A turn-based haulage simulation for Android, a rebuild of an economy classic from 1998. The first commit is from 1 September, and there have been 186 since.

• Model and our own: The original is available as readable data. Mechanics and numbers are taken over, all images, sounds, texts and the title are new.
• Images: They are made in batches with an image generator, six to eight objects per run. A script checks them afterwards, and only the ones that failed are looked at by hand.
• Status: The game is complete in content and has been through two review rounds. Still open are the device acceptance, a native speaker proofreading the English texts, and setting up the Play Console.

New on the workbench: Cargopolis

A transport building game for Android and the largest project in the studio: 298 commits since the first one on 22 August. The most important decision came on 6 October, and it was a retreat.

• Before: 3D with third-party models. That was 650 models in four art styles, 71 MB of material, around 300 draw calls on the map, and on the emulator the build took 24 seconds before the app restarted.
• The test: The same map as isometric vector geometry got by with 14 draw calls, at about one millisecond of render time. It also looked better.
• After: Since 10 October the project rule is 2.5D only. On paper that costs around 50 extra working days (an estimate, plus or minus 30 percent), but it saves sourcing, licences and Blender work. Even air traffic was switched from Blender models to vector shapes on 11 October.

Cargopolis has not yet been measured on a real device. Until that is done there is no date.

What is resting

Indy 500 Reloaded has 20 commits, the last from 5 September. For Sky Baron the last change is from 23 July. Both are paused, not cancelled. Imperium1 keeps going on the side, without a schedule. If you look for their pages: they are still there, just no longer on the workbench.

What gets finished first

The order is the Anpfiff1 WM Edition, then Smiley Battle.

• WM Edition (95 percent): 633 commits since 13 May, around 150,000 lines of game code, the test suite is green. No game content is missing, the device test is. The review on 23 September found two bugs that never showed up on the computer: the back button ended the game without asking, and the power saving mode was missing.
• Smiley Battle (85 percent): Pre-registration is running, and on 6 October a game robot arrived that plays through all scenes, along with a series of fixed findings.

The rules for the last ten percent

• At most two projects at the same time: one in the final stretch, one to build on.
• Feature freeze from the final stretch on. New things get their own version number.
• Device before polish. An afternoon with two phones does more than three weeks of fine-tuning on the computer.
• Finished means in the store, not perfect.

The workbench now shows the status

Every piece has a bar and the date of the last work. The percentages are estimates. The date is a Git entry and cannot be prettified: if you have not heard from something since September, you can see it there.