🎮 New Game: CORELOCK

Hello everyone! 👋

In my last post I told you that I’ve been working intensively on RAR III for some months now. That’s true, and that’s where most of my energy is going (besides my main job, as usual!).

But it’s not the only thing I’ve been doing!

In parallel, since a few days/weeks ago, I’ve been experimenting with a few small game ideas. Little concepts, quick prototypes, things I wanted to build partly to have fun and partly to learn. Most of them will probably never see the light of day. But one of them is finished, polished, and ready.

It’s called CORELOCK, and you can play it right now, in your browser, for FREE: 👉 Play CORELOCK on the browser

No install, no store, no waiting. Just open it and play!

And if you’d rather have it on your phone, it’s out now on Google Play too: 👉 Get CORELOCK on the Play Store!

What is CORELOCK?#

CORELOCK is a casual arcade puzzle game, inspired by classics like Puzzle Bobble (or Bust-a-Move, depending on where you grew up 😄) and other arcade games I have very fond memories of.

You shoot pieces, you match them, you clear the board… and you protect the core. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch!

I want to be honest about what this is: it is much more casual than my usual RAR games. There is no world to explore, no inventory, no hundreds of items and ideas behind it. It’s a game you can pick up for three minutes while waiting for the bus, and put down without feeling you left something unfinished. That’s the point.

It’s also already available on the Play Store. It’s a cheap game, priced low on purpose. More on why in a moment.

About making other games#

Some of you have only known me since RAR I, so this may come as a surprise: RAR was not my first game. Before it, I published other small ones (Multijumper, Snow Project, and Infinite Noob) that were, let me be very clear about this: terrible 😅

But they were my first steps as a developer, and I’m not embarrassed by them. Everyone starts somewhere!

I’ll write a separate post about those three, screenshots and all.

The technical side (for the curious)#

CORELOCK wasn’t only about making a small game. It was also about learning.

I built it with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, and the result is that the exact same codebase runs on the web, Android and iOS. Being able to hand you a link and have you playing in your browser two seconds later, from the same code that ships to a phone, is still nowadays honestly amazing to me.

And this matters more than it might look. While building CORELOCK, I’ve also been building the foundations: a shared base of menus, audio, theming, translations, platform integrations, build setup… all the plumbing that other small games like this one need (and nobody wants to write twice!). 💪

Why more games is good news for RAR#

Here’s the part I really want you to understand.

Every additional game I publish is another door through which someone can find the RAR games. More players discovering my work means a bigger community, more people on Discord and Reddit, more feedback, more ideas.

And here’s an honest, practical part too: more sources of “income”.

Right now I work on all of this on weekends and some sleepless nights, after my main job. The dream, the actual, real dream, is to one day have my own one-person game studio, dedicated to making RAR games and other things I care about, full time.

I’m not there yet. I may never be. But every small game, every purchase, every review, every person who joins the community pushes that door open a little wider…

So if you play CORELOCK and enjoy it, and then grab it on the Play Store: know that you’re not just buying a small casual game. You’re buying me a few more hours to work on RAR III 👼

Afterword#

Go play it!

It’s free in the browser, it takes a few seconds to understand, and I’d love to know what you think.

Drop your thoughts on Discord (no sub-reddit for this game, at least not yet).

And don’t worry: RAR III remains the priority. This little detour is actually to make that road smoother 💪

Thanks, as always, for being here! 🙏

Archison (Luis)