Maxwell Cadman Readable, not solved
Every ingredient has a legible role, but placement, order, heat and care change the outcome. Players can reason about the brew without ever being certain of it.
← Selected work
Live on App Store · Android testing
Stircery
A turn-based alchemy game about reading a changing cauldron. Every ingredient shifts the brew in ways you can read but not fully predict — and the brew can always take one more thing, or be ruined by it.
- Role
- Design, engineering, art direction and release — independent, end to end
- Surfaces
- iOS 15+ · Android 8+
- Status
- Live on App Store · Android closed testing
- Stack
- Unity 6 · C# · 2D URP · Android AAB · iOS App Store
01
The design problem
One decision, asked until it gets hard.
A brewing game lives or dies on whether the player can read the state. If reactions feel arbitrary, every choice is a guess; if they are fully predictable, there is no tension left. The whole design turns on holding that line.
A career with texture
Ten handcrafted orders introduce customers, recipes, guild trials, a night market and class choices — each adding a rule rather than a menu.
Short sessions, real depth
Turn-based brewing suits a phone: a single brew fits a bus ride, and stopping mid-order never costs progress.
No pressure mechanics
No energy timer, no account, no forced advertising. The game asks for attention, not for a return visit at a scheduled time.
02
Engineering and release
Balance you can prove, not just feel.
Hand-tuning a reaction system across ten orders is guesswork at scale. Instead the balance was driven from an offline simulation harness, so changes could be measured against thousands of generated boards before reaching a build.
Simulated balance
Generated boards were run in bulk to check that every order stayed solvable and that no single ingredient line dominated.
Interruption-safe saves
A brew interrupted before scoring resumes from its saved state; a scored brew resumes after scoring. Closing the app mid-order is never punished.
Accessibility as a feature
Large text, contrast options, reduced motion, and independent audio and haptic controls are built in rather than retrofitted.
Privacy by construction
No player account and no analytics SDK. Progress, discoveries and settings stay on the device; production builds disable Unity's connected services entirely.
Unity 6C#2D URPOffline balance harness
Android AABiOS App Store
Verified delivery
Published on iOS, with Android testing underway.
2production mobile builds
10handcrafted career orders
31reactive ingredients
Freeno ads, no energy timers
Stircery is live on the App Store for iPhone. The Android release remains in closed testing; the figures above describe product scope rather than estimated audience or revenue.
AndroidClosed testing