We <3 recycling: staying in ARPG and poking around inside it

A few recent conversations with people across the industry have circled back to the same observation: our approach, sticking to a genre while poking around within it, seems to excite people, and it's paying off. It's worth unpacking why.

Reuse compounds

When we stay close to one genre instead of jumping to a new one every project, we get to reuse and repurpose structures, code, assets, design elements, and decisions we've already made and tested. That reuse doesn't just save time once. It compounds. Each project inherits a little more of a working foundation than the last, and development keeps getting faster.

Old data is a gift

As an analyst, having a back catalog to draw on is enormously useful. It tells what worked, what could have worked better, and just as importantly what not to touch.

Of course, over time player expectations shift, the market moves, and regulations change. Those are real evolutionary pressures, that needs to be considered, too.

From incremental to radical

Here's the part that surprised even us a little: this habit of recycling elements hasn't just made iteration faster, it's made bigger swings possible. We're not just talking about small tweaks to mechanics, visuals, or structure anymore. We're releasing genuinely different games every other month, each one borrowing gameplay or visuals from what came before while experimenting freely elsewhere.

You could call that iteration too, and in a sense it is. But looking at the actual games side by side, they're different experiences with different gameplay, goals and mechanics. I’d claim that it would have been much harder to pull off novelty without different variants to borrow from and build on.