Who's behind it
Baker Games started as a personal portfolio and grew into a small studio. It's one developer with about a decade of web development behind them, from front-end interfaces to servers and databases, and a growing love of game engines. Both show up in everything here.
The projects try to bring together things that don't usually meet: data visualization and games, tools and play, all with a front-end-first, personal twist. Spellbox leans into game-engine systems built by hand. Churn puts a 3D chess board, a tournament simulator, and live multiplayer into a browser tab. SteamMap turns a Steam library into a graph you can explore, and Claude Monitor is a small, focused tool built because I actually needed one.
This is where I keep learning and make things I think are fun or useful. It's not a client agency. I hope to keep making more, and maybe work with other people on something down the line.
What we make, and how
Everything here follows a few rules:
- Instant play. Every game runs in a browser tab. There's nothing to download or install, and you don't need an account to start.
- Built from scratch. Spellbox and Churn don't use Unity, Godot, or another engine. The rendering, rules, audio, and interface are written by hand, and the parts worth reusing are being collected into Baker Engine, our in-house engine for future games.
- Fair to players. No pay-to-win. Accounts are optional, and they exist to save your history and put you on leaderboards.
- Made to last. Code is written to be understood and fixed years from now, and it's tested: Churn alone has over 400 automated tests.
The devlog covers how specific pieces were built, and each game's page (Churn and Spellbox) explains how to play and how it was made.
Meet Loaf
Loaf is the studio mascot: a loaf of shokupan, Japanese milk bread, with a glossy toasted top that looks a bit like a haircut. It's a play on the studio's name, and it's meant to be recognizable at any size, from the 16-pixel icon in your browser tab to the hero of the homepage.
Loaf isn't a drawing. It's a 3D model built entirely in code with Three.js, shaded to look hand-painted, and filmed frame by frame in a headless browser. The devlog post explains how.