Why I'm building Pyrekin

Hello. I'm a solo developer, and I've been playing too much Slay the Spire on the train. Long enough to know what kind of game I want to play in a browser tab during a coffee break. There isn't one. So I'm going to make it.

The plan is small and specific:

• A deck-building roguelike — fights, drafts, branching map.
• Runs in the browser. No download, no launcher.
• One hand-built class first; expand if anyone shows up.
• F2P with cosmetic skins. Nothing for sale that affects gameplay.
• Self-hosted on a single VPS so the running cost is fixed.

Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Postgres. Game engine in plain TS so I can run it on the server later for replay-validated leaderboards. No Unity, no canvas, no physics. The whole game is a state machine with cards.

The danger is the same as every solo project — I will start, I will get stuck somewhere boring, I will lose interest. The defence is to ship something playable in a month, even if it's ugly. Then iterate from there. That's the entire roadmap.

I'll write here roughly every two weeks. Some posts will be technical, some will be patch notes, some will be me complaining about my own architecture decisions. If you're building something similar and want to compare notes, write to hello@pyrekin.com.

Next post: a card-play loop you can hit End Turn on.