Making Cascade: how a doodle became our flagship game
6 min read · by Mira & Theo
Every studio has an origin story. Ours fits on a napkin — literally. It started with a doodle of a little rocket trying to fly up a waterfall, going almost nowhere but looking terribly determined about it. We laughed, and then we thought: that's a game.
The 48-hour jam
We took the idea into a weekend game jam with the theme "against the current". The rules wrote themselves: you're a tiny rocket, the whole world flows downward, and your only job is to keep rising. By Sunday night we had a rough, janky, oddly addictive prototype and a name we couldn't stop saying out loud.
The best mechanics are the ones you can explain in one breath. "Fly up, dodge rocks, grab stars" was ours.
Finding the feel
The prototype worked, but it didn't feel right until we added three small things:
- Rocket tilt. Tilting the rocket toward its movement made steering feel alive instead of robotic.
- Star bursts. A tiny puff of golden particles on pickup turned "collecting" into "celebrating".
- Gentle escalation. Difficulty ramps so slowly you never notice — until you look up and realise you're weaving through chaos.
None of these are clever. All of them mattered. Game feel is a hundred tiny decisions, and players feel the sum without seeing the parts.
Keeping it kind
We made two promises early: no ads, and no account walls. Your best score lives on your device, the game loads instantly, and it works on a five-year-old phone. That meant building for the browser with plain canvas and no heavy frameworks — a constraint that kept the whole thing tiny and fast.
Shipping (and never quite finishing)
Cascade went live, players played, and the emails started. Someone in Manila beat our best score by a mile. A teacher wrote to say her students play it between lessons. That's the whole reason we do this.
You can play the exact game this post is about, right now, in your browser. Go see how high you can climb — then tell us how you did.