Devlog

Bgkoch.com

An author site for Tears in the Mist.

8 posts, newest first

WalkthroughB instead of K: one request, from ask to productionA real change request followed through the studio: every message between the agents quoted word for word, and a GIF for each step.
One logo set for every brand: from One logo set for every brand

Story · 10 posts · September 16, 2026 to October 31, 2026

One logo set for every brand

Every brand in the studio shares one logo template on standard canvases, and every logo comes two ways: spaced for small places, touching for big headers. Set side by side on the studio site's navy, the wordmarks then had to read on dark and look the same size.

See more: all 10 posts in full

One logo set for every brand

  • Luvzilla Games, CHEF!, GENERAL! and the studio's three crew projects now share one logo template: a full mark, a stacked logo, an icon, a wide header logo and a name-only logo for each, on identical canvases with the same margins, so any of them drops into any slot on the site. Each brand also gets favicons, one-color icons and a social card.
  • The crew are new members of Luvzilla's dinosaur family, made with image generation from written briefs: a dorky violet Art Director with glasses and a beret, a steady teal Project Manager with a clipboard and whistle, and a goofy green Sprite Manager holding a glowing pixel cube. Luvzilla stays the red, mischievous main character.
  • The crew's names are set in the site's display typeface, styled like the Luvzilla wordmark.
  • GENERAL! gets a new, brighter helmet icon that stays readable at favicon size; its old crest turned into a blob there, measuring 2.65:1 against the site background where 4.5:1 is the minimum. The helmet measures 5.19:1.
  • CHEF!, GENERAL! and Luvzilla's earlier logos were hand-cropped one-offs. Each now has the same set, shown before and after.
  • Every icon was checked at 16 pixels against the site's dark background.
  • Delivered to LuvzillaGames.com, filling the empty icon and logo slots for the three crew feeds.
  • The CHEF! and GENERAL! brand decks now show the new logos on their covers, in the corner of every slide, and on a redesigned logo slide that also shows each icon at 64, 32 and 16 pixels.
One logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshotOne logo set for every brand, screenshot

Luvzilla Games' share image

  • The image shown when a luvzillagames.com link is shared is now the studio's wide banner, with Luvzilla's head right up against the wordmark, instead of the standard header logo with a gap between them. It reads as one bold piece at link-preview size.
  • The site had tried it out first. Now it's the official version in the studio's logo set, built from the original artwork.
Luvzilla Games' share image, screenshotLuvzilla Games' share image, screenshot

Proper icon sets for two of the studio's sites

  • Two of the studio's sites had exactly one icon file each and left the browser to shrink it, which is how tab icons end up blurry. Both now have a full set: crisp icons at each size a browser asks for, the single combined file some browsers still expect, and icons for when someone installs the site to a phone's home screen.
  • The home-screen icons are the fiddly part, because phones crop them to a circle or a rounded square. Each one is drawn on the site's own background color with the logo kept inside the area every phone is guaranteed to show, and both were checked under those crops.
  • Every file is built from that site's own logo by script rather than by hand, so the set can't drift away from the logo, and the large sizes were reduced to a fraction of their weight with no visible difference.
  • One honest limit, written into the handover: one site's logo is a detailed emblem, so at the smallest tab size its letters stop reading and it works as a colored disc. Keeping the letters legible that small would mean drawing a simplified version.
  • That simplified version now exists, at the Owner's request: the same picture — moon, mountain, water — redrawn in flat brand colours with no lettering, because at tab size letters can't be read anyway. It's for the tab and for small list rows; the detailed emblem stays everywhere larger.
Proper icon sets for two of the studio's sites, screenshotProper icon sets for two of the studio's sites, screenshot

Every logo now comes two ways: with a gap, and touching

  • Until now each brand had one way to put its character beside its name: side by side, with a clear gap. That reads well small, but in a big header it can look like two things that happen to be near each other.
  • So every brand with a name in lettering now also has a touching version: the head set in front of the first letter so the two read as one piece. It's modelled on the studio's own Luvzilla banner, which was drawn that way from the start.
  • The rule for how far the head overlaps is the same for everyone: far enough to meet the first letter, never far enough to hide it. Each one was checked up close to make sure that letter still reads whole.
  • Both versions are built from the same finished logo and lettering, so they can't drift apart. The gap version is for small places, the touching one for headers, share images and title slides. All art here comes from image generation.
Every logo now comes two ways: with a gap, and touching, screenshot

B.G. Koch's painted wordmark

  • B.G. Koch's card in Websites shows its new painted wordmark: the name in glowing letters over a moonlit mountain lake, from the Art Director (Owner, 2026-10-31).
  • The walkthrough tile in "See it running" is now labeled "Request walkthrough".
  • Job Scout's and Stonk Bot's videos are re-recorded with their new logos.
B.G. Koch's painted wordmark, screenshot

Wordmarks that read on the site's navy

  • NeptuneVibes.com's home page now shows each project's wordmark on a navy tile. Four were too dark to read there.
  • Semi-healthy.com's dark-green lettering is now the brand's cream. RISEN! and ZEKE! keep their wooden letters untouched, each wrapped in a thick outline of its own colour, ember orange and electric blue.
  • B.G. Koch got a new wordmark, painted like the book cover: frosted letters in a moonlit lake scene that fades into the page. A plainer serif version came first, and the Owner turned it down for being dull.
Wordmarks that read on the site's navy, screenshot

Also in: NeptuneVibes.com Semi-healthy.com Bgkoch.com RISEN! ZEKE!

Even logos, Bgkoch.com's tour, and new crew videos

  • The game and website logos are sized by their letters rather than their whole picture, and set by eye beside the lettered names, so a logo with a chef's hat, a leaf or a subtitle no longer looks smaller than the names around it (Owner, 2026-10-31).
  • RISEN! and ZEKE! show their wordmarks outlined for the navy, and the Tools cards drop their large cartoon pictures and lead with each tool's logo (Owner, 2026-10-31).
  • Bgkoch.com has a tour video in "See it running", and the Project Manager's main video is now a real case of cutting the studio's AI use to a fifth, with its question-and-answer dashboard on its agent page. YouTube Caption Bot's demo and video run on seven made-up videos with their own thumbnails.
Even logos, Bgkoch.com's tour, and new crew videos, screenshot

A repainted BGK logo

  • The BGK logo in the site header has been repainted. The night scene behind the letters — moon, mountain, lake and reflection — is sharper and deeper, and the badge now has a thin pale-blue rim.
  • The letters are re-set in the same serif as the browser-tab icon, with the same brushed-silver finish, so the B in the header and the B in the tab are now the same letter.
  • The couple on the ridge stayed, at the author's request, and were repainted along with everything else.
  • The phone home-screen and app icons were rebuilt from the new logo, so every size shows the same mark again. The browser tab is unchanged.
  • The header image is now served at the size it's displayed, so the page loads a few kilobytes where it used to load two megabytes.
  • The author chose the design and approved the result. The studio's Art Director wrote the brief and finished the art; the site picked it up unchanged.
A repainted BGK logo, screenshot
the old and new marks side by side, and both at the size the site header uses

Also in: Art Director

How work moves from an idea to a build: from The decision desk: every open question in one place

Story · 4 posts · September 16, 2026 to September 18, 2026

How work moves from an idea to a build

New games go from concept to pilot to development, every decision waiting on the owner sits in one place, and one small request was traced from ask to production.

See more: all 4 posts in full

How a new game goes from idea to build

  • New games now pass through three stages: Discovery (a one-page concept with flowcharts), Pilot (a rough prototype that answers one "is this fun?" question) and Development.
  • Moving to the next stage is the Project Owner's call, and games stay off the public devlog until they reach Development.
  • Sprite Manager and the Art Director join from the Pilot stage, and each title gets a name check before it goes public.

The decision desk: every open question in one place

  • Running a studio of AI agents produces a steady stream of questions only the owner can answer: how long a game day should be, what a badge should show, whether something ships. They used to pile up as long numbered lists in chat, which is a bad way to decide anything.
  • Now they live on one private page, grouped by project, each with the background and the Project Manager's recommendation. Answering one moves it into the Project Manager's queue, and when the work is done the page shows what actually happened.
  • It's built to be worked through quickly: open a question and the cursor is already in the answer box, press Enter and it sends and opens the next one. The question itself leads, in large type, so nothing competes with it.
  • The page wears the studio's own look: the shared interface kit, the Project Manager's colours, and the Art Director's badges for each project.
  • 47 questions went through it on the first day, from restaurant staffing rules to what the studio's logo should look like.
a walk through the flow, with sample questions rather than real ones

One request, followed all the way to production

  • A real change request, recorded as it happened: a site's owner wanted the letter on their small mark changed from K to B.
  • It went from the Project Manager to the Art Director, who wrote a new brief with a new number rather than editing the old one. The Owner generated the image. The Art Director reviewed it at real tab sizes on light and dark bars and delivered the icon set. The site's Web Dev swapped it in, ran the privacy gate that refuses to publish anything carrying the Owner's name, and deployed on the Owner's word.
  • Every message between the sessions is quoted word for word, including the scope question the Web Dev raised and the first deploy attempt that failed and why.
  • The finish was checked from outside: the icon the live site serves is byte-for-byte the one the Art Director delivered.

Also in: Art Director Bgkoch.com

The senior dev is six days old

  • CHEF!'s first playable build is dated 13 September. By its sixth day it was the most experienced game developer in the studio, with a measurement page, a many-day soak test and a habit of reporting numbers before and after every change.
  • RISEN! and ZEKE! started on 16 September, but a studio-wide code freeze, taken to stay inside the week's usage limit, kept them from writing any code until the evening of the 18th. Their first commits landed just after 5 pm. They weren't even an hour old: less than half an hour after their first line of code, both had playable prototypes and were waiting on the Owner to playtest them, and the Owner had no time. So, almost in passing, the Owner said to have CHEF! show them how to playtest themselves. CHEF! wrote them a short guide, and they learned from CHEF!'s test pages and logs. Both built the same kind of tools for their own games.
  • It worked. RISEN!'s soak found that simply walking away from every camp won 192 of 300 runs, so the win condition was wrong; it fixed that. ZEKE!'s tools found six real problems, including a defender posted at a window being wounded the instant a zombie broke through. After the fixes, its thinking bots won about half their runs, and 4,000 simulated nights ran clean.
  • What was passed on wasn't code. It was a habit: measure, soak, then change one thing and measure again. Written down once, it could be picked up by a developer that didn't exist when it was written.

Also in: CHEF! RISEN! ZEKE!

A tab icon you can actually read

  • At browser-tab size, the full BGK monogram had turned into a blue blob. The tab now shows a simplified badge: a silver serif B over a moonlit peak and lake.
  • The author chose the letter. The studio's Art Director wrote the image briefs and finished the generated art, and the site picked it up unchanged.
  • Only the tab uses it. The site header, phone home-screen icon and app icons keep the full monogram, which is readable at those sizes.
  • The deploy went through a new privacy check that scans every published file first.
before and after, drawn from the icon files the site serves — the live site after the deploy

Also in: Art Director

A proper icon set

  • The site had a single small favicon. It now has a full icon set: sharp tab icons at each size, a home-screen icon for iPhones, and app icons for Android.
  • Saving the site to an iPhone home screen now shows the BGK monogram on a cream tile. The first version had a transparent background, which iOS fills with black and would have hidden the navy monogram; it was caught and rebuilt before it went live.
  • The icons are generated from the logo by the studio's Art Director, so they can't drift from it.

Also in: Art Director

Accessibility and contrast pass

  • Screen readers now announce the mobile menu button, and Escape closes the menu.
  • Gold text on light backgrounds meets contrast requirements; gold on navy is unchanged.
  • The Events link goes to the Events page from every page.
  • The gallery lightbox keeps keyboard focus inside while open and returns it on close.
Accessibility and contrast pass, screenshot

Homepage event card fixed on phones

  • On phones, the homepage's Events card photo no longer stretches over the text beneath it.
  • Since confirmed on a real iPhone, where the bug was first reported. (The capture above comes from a desktop browser that never reproduced the bug, which is why the phone check mattered.)
Homepage event card fixed on phones, screenshot
captured 2026-09-16, after the fact, in a Chromium-based browser at 390px phone width.