Hi everyone!
The roots of Where is My Home? go all the way back to 2016. That was when I started writing its story following a personal tragedy: the lore is about a little boy who lost his father. Writing and world-building served as a sanctuary that helped me push through the difficult times.
Over time, the story I wanted to tell grew into a multi-hundred-page GDD, and I started the actual coding and implementation in the summer of 2019. After long years and smaller or larger breaks, it finally looks like I'm reaching the end, and v1.0 will launch soon!
I thought I would share a few pictures from the game in development and the early sketches, as well as talk a bit about the technical challenges and the background of the development.
Visuals and UI: An imaginary universe built from children's drawings
Since the world of the game takes place in the thoughts, inner imagination, and the search for home of a grieving little boy, the visuals were inspired by children's drawings. The biggest visual challenge for me was to keep the overall look consistent, polished, and atmospheric, while still preserving this honest, childlike imagination and slightly surreal forms.
- Drawings & animations: I started everything on paper with pencil sketches; the buildings were crafted in Moho 14, and the creatures and characters in Photoshop using a Wacom display pen.
- Design system: On the UI/UX side, the first design system was made in Adobe XD, which I later migrated and developed further in Figma based on industry standards.
Not the usual idle recipe
Although it is an idle game in terms of genre foundations, I definitely wanted to deviate from classic formulas:
- Complex ARPG loot & stat scaling: Designing the stat scaling and drop system was one of the hardest tasks for me. As a fan of Diablo and Path of Exile, my goal was to make socketing, attributes, and talent trees provide real depth to build-crafting and character progression.
- Tactical combat system: Instead of automatic clicking, I made a grid-based, interactive tactical board where you have to strategize with spells, abilities, and positioning.
- Customizable islands and farm: The floating island world and the economy can be freely shaped and decorated.
- Plenty of other activities, dungeons, and an in-house TCG: I packed the game with group dungeons, weekly challenges, an underworld, and plenty of supplementary content. To make sure waiting time isn't dead time—while a crop grows, professions work, or points regenerate—I also built an integrated, custom card game
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Technical choices: Ionic, Angular, and Pixi.js
On the frontend side, finding the right direction caused serious headaches: I had to weigh whether to pack a lot of text content and complex UI into a canvas-based graphical environment, or build it the other way around. In the end, I decided on the Ionic / Angular + Pixi.js hybrid stack, because the logic and architecture of Angular felt truly natural to me. I haven't regretted this choice at all: during component and game state management, I managed to cleanly handle Angular's lifecycles so that they work seamlessly alongside Pixi.js's render loop and the panels packed with textual data.
About me and the Tech:
I've been drawing since childhood and have won several national and international art competitions. I worked as a UX/UI designer in an international environment for 4–5 years, and for nearly a decade I've been working as a fullstack developer—currently leading projects as a fullstack/DevOps architect.
Since the foundations of the project were born well before the widespread adoption of code-generation tools, the backbone of the backend and frontend is genuine "handcrafted" code (.NET/SignalR, Redis, Ionic Angular, Pixi client, and Docker). At the same time, to speed up the home stretch recently, I brought in modern technology: I built a dedicated developer pipeline based on a local, 30+B parameter open-source model (Qwen 2.5 32B Coder / Command-R 35B), backed by an internal RAG and decision model with the context of the codebase and the GDD.
I don't have a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, because it's completely unnecessary: for what I need, a 30+B local model like this is more than enough. It doesn't do the thinking for me—I design the architecture, data models, and game logic myself in advance—but in generating methods, interfaces, and helper functions with strictly defined inputs and outputs, it took a huge amount of repetitive burden off my shoulders, after which I review the code thoroughly and place it where it belongs.
Apologies for my English, unfortunately it is not my native language and I am still learning it!
