zenoworks.studio
zenoworks.studio
My daughter Iris asked me that. It is why this studio exists.
I'm Steven. I work in the medical field. I make these games and tools after work, one at a time. Iris plays every one of them — she is my first player, and my strictest tester.
I think games can be more than fun. They can also train hand-eye coordination, memory, and reaction speed. That is why our games are short, clear, and easy to start.
For me the pleasure of making games is building something I find interesting and letting other people play it. Each of the four came from a different place.
ZenoWorks Connect is a tribute. Years ago I played a matching game I found genuinely brilliant, and later could never find it again. I rebuilt it from memory — the artwork is entirely different, the play is similar in spirit. What I most wanted to keep was time refilling on every clear: time is not a fixed budget, it is something you earn by clearing quickly.
ZenoWorks Mahjong Solitaire grew out of Connect. Only after finishing it did I realise mahjong solitaire is the same family of game — find an identical pair and remove it — with a different rule for which tiles may move right now. So it reuses Connect's structure directly.
ZenoWorks Sudoku came from a sudden thought: sudoku does not actually need numbers. At its core it is combinatorics — nine things that differ from one another, each appearing once per row, column and box. What those nine things are is irrelevant. We use digits out of habit.
ZenoWorks 2048 has an Easy mode that is not really a "simple mode". It came from noticing a side effect of the classic rule. No new tile unless something moved sounds reasonable, but it means the only way to get a new tile is to move — and any move risks lifting your biggest tile out of its corner, after which it never goes back.
What these four have in common is the same order of work: figure something out first, then build a game around it.
My time goes mostly into how a game plays. Art and music are not my strengths and there is no team behind me, so the finish will fall short in places — thank you for bearing with that. If something in one of these games strikes you as a clever piece of design, that is almost certainly the part I spent the longest on.
Questions, bug reports and ideas are all welcome.
ZenoWorks Co., Ltd.
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