Est. in a kitchen · one employee · zero investors · several tacos
Nopal Games is a very serious game studio. It is also one person, a laptop, and a paddle cactus that refuses to die. Everything we make grows the same way the nopal does: nobody waters it, nothing about the soil is encouraging, and it comes out covered in spines.
Somebody still has to scrape the spines off before dinner. That is the job. That is the entire company.
Not mastered in eleven seconds. Understood. If a person cannot tell what the screen wants from them before the kettle boils, we did the hard part wrong and put a tutorial on top of it to hide the evidence.
You lost. That is the sentence. The joke goes after the sentence, where it belongs, and it has to earn its place. A player who is confused about whether they won is not in the mood for our wordplay.
Every button that can undo an afternoon stops and asks first. This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, which is why we keep saying it out loud like it is a big idea.
We were asked for one once. The answer was “lol”, followed by sunglasses, followed by another build going out.
The spines are the mission statement.
One finished-ish, one shelf deliberately left empty, because a studio with a single game and a page that says “our games” in the plural is a studio telling its first lie early.
Five roads. Two homes. Snacks for money.
A lane-based battler where a clan of ninjas and a horde of extremely misunderstood monsters argue over five stretches of road, and the currency is food. Thirty-two missions, a marketplace, weather that makes everybody walk slower, and at least one battle that turns into football without warning.
Thirty-two missions built, eight languages, six platforms, and the multiplayer works — which was the frightening one. What is left is the part nobody screenshots: balancing thirty-two characters until none of them is the obvious answer.
We are not going to explain the whole thing here. It has its own house.
lanestrike.com →Currently a folder with a bad name in it.
It exists the way all of them start existing: as a sentence that would not shut up. When it is more than that, it will be here, and it will get its own domain too, because we have learned that trying to make one website do two games makes a website that does neither.
Founder · Lead Developer · Only Employee · Person Who Also Does The Taxes
He will return your call after this next game.
Not a methodology. A set of habits that stopped specific disasters, each one of which happened at least once first.
The price of a road is written down once. Not once in the game, once in the balancing tool and once in a comment that is now a lie — once. A small team cannot afford to be wrong in three files at the same time.
Thousands of simulated battles per change. If a tweak makes one side win more than it should, we find out from a number, not from a review.
Some of our tests fail on purpose, because they are measurements of a thing that is genuinely still too hard. Editing a test until it agrees with a bug is how you ship the bug with a certificate.
There is no committee. There is one person, occasionally sunglasses, and an extremely opinionated document at the root of the repository that tells future versions what past versions got wrong.
Press, publishers, players, people who found a bug at two in the morning: all welcome, all read, answered in whatever order the day allows.
Press kit: coming, and it will be an actual folder of actual images rather than a form you have to fill in.
