We started with a single puzzle and a stubborn brief from a chemistry teacher: make it feel like a lab. Not a cartoon of one — a real bench, glass that catches the window light, liquid that sits heavy at the bottom of the tube. That game became Lab Sort. Everything after it inherited the same rule: the feel comes first, the feature list comes last.
We are four people. We write the code, draw the glass, tune the levels and argue about the sound a full tube makes. Some of the repetitive work is done by software we built in-house; none of the deciding is. A level ships when a person has played it enough times to be sure it is fair, and a little kind.
We don't ship until it feels right at 2am.
Most of what we make is small and finished. We'd rather release one hundred good levels than a thousand generated ones, and we'd rather fix a wobble in the pour animation than add a daily reward.
“One hundred levels. One hundred and seventeen passing tests. One teacher's brief: make it feel like a lab.Lab Sort — design notes, March 2026
Pour coloured liquid between glass tubes until every tube holds one colour. 250 levels across eight themed labs, sealed samples that hide their layers, and a Game Center leaderboard.
180 early-learning activities in 12 languages for children aged three to seven, with a parent view that explains what was practised and why.
We keep these instead of a blog. They are short because the work is more interesting than the writing about it.
New flask on the door. Four oranges tried; this one stayed. — D.
Lab Sort grows to 250 levels across eight labs. Build 11 is on TestFlight; the App Store is next.
Lab Sort level 73 rewritten after a tester called it mean. It was. Now it is merely difficult.
Pour animation slows by 40 ms at the lip of the tube. Nobody will notice. Everybody will feel it.
Growli ships its twelfth language. Our teacher insisted on checking every pluralisation herself.
Neural Bloom prototype: the garden learned to avoid the corner where we always prune. Unsettling. Kept.