Three apps shipped: what now?
Three apps shipped
Hyper Shards installs from our website as a PWA. Garden Defense is in Google Play and the App Store. The studio's own website is live, and players write in every week.
Kai and Remy want something bigger: Shard Garden, an online co-op game where four friends defend one garden on a drifting shard of rock. It will run on the web, phones, Steam and consoles.
What changes when a game gets big
Hyper Shards took a few weekends. Shard Garden is different in four ways:
- More peopleSeveral teammates build different parts at once, so they need to agree before they start.
- Months, not weekendsA wrong guess now costs months of work, not one Saturday.
- Servers that never sleepGardens live on our servers, day and night, in many countries.
- Real money at stakeSalaries, servers and maybe a publisher's money depend on the plan.
Quick check
Why does Shard Garden need more planning than Hyper Shards did?
- A wrong guess costs months of several people's work, not one weekend
- Big games are not allowed to use AI teammates
- Stores only accept games that come with a plan
Show the answer
A wrong guess costs months of several people's work, not one weekend
Planning is cheap compared with rebuilding. The bigger the game, the more a wrong guess costs, so the team checks its guesses before it builds.
Planning is deciding
Planning is not predicting the future perfectly. It is making decisions early, writing them down, and testing the riskiest guesses first.
Steve McConnell, who studies software estimates at the company Construx, puts it this way: an estimate only gets more accurate as the team makes decisions that remove unknowns. Waiting does not help. Deciding does.
This stage's map
In this stage the studio plans Shard Garden in four parts:
- BetsWhich game to make, and what evidence would change our minds.
- DocumentsDesign docs, RFCs and decision records, so everyone builds the same game.
- Guesses with numbersEstimates and risks, written as ranges and scores.
- MilestonesPrototype, vertical slice, alpha, beta and gold.
Quick check
A plan is only useful if every guess in it turns out right.
- True
- False
Show the answer
False
Plans exist because guesses are often wrong. A good plan says which guesses are risky and how the team will find out early.
Player message
Make Shard Garden an MMO with 1,000 players per garden, plus a movie and a board game!
What should Kai and Remy do first?
- Thank them, then write down what Shard Garden is and is not before adding anything
- Add all three, because a player asked
- Stop reading #ideas from now on
Show the answer
Thank them, then write down what Shard Garden is and is not before adding anything
Ideas are welcome, but a plan starts by deciding what the game is. Writing down what it will not do keeps a big project from growing without end.
First question: which game?
Shard Garden is Kai and Remy's favourite idea. But a favourite is not evidence. Before the studio spends a year on it, it needs a way to find out whether players will love it too.
Bolt says: Next: how studios bet on a game, and the evidence that changes their minds.
Fact-checked 12 October 2026
- Construx: The Cone of Uncertainty construx.com