Studio notes

Not Fake News

Build logs, launch stories, and lessons from shipping games and brands. Written by the studio, not a content calendar.

Index10 entries

Scroll-driven 3D without wrecking your page

We put a single continuous 3D world behind 14,000 pixels of marketing copy and kept the homepage at 144 kB. Here is the architecture, the maths, and the four bugs that cost us the most time.

August 7, 202614 min readthree.js, react-three-fiber, webgl

Studio

We built it, then deleted it

We put shop signs carrying every project we have shipped down the 3D street on our homepage. It was a good idea that could not survive its own constraints, so it lasted about four hours.

August 6, 20266 min readprocess, 3d, design decisions

Engineering

Stripe checkout without a product catalogue

Creating a Stripe product and copying its price ID into an environment variable is the documented path and it is the wrong default for most sites. Define the charge at redirect time instead, from one source of truth in your code.

July 30, 20268 min readstripe, payments, next.js

How we work

How a design and development subscription actually works

A flat monthly fee, one active request, pause whenever. Where that model genuinely beats hiring or an agency retainer, where it does not, and the failure modes nobody selling it will tell you about.

July 22, 20269 min readsubscription, pricing, working together

Engineering

We took the blog off the CMS

Our articles used to be fetched from Notion. Now they are JSON files in the repository, and the whole thing builds with no network call. What that traded away, and when you should not do it.

July 15, 20267 min readnext.js, content, architecture

Opinion

When a 3D website is worth it, and when it is decoration

We build these for a living, which is exactly why we will talk you out of one. Four cases where 3D genuinely earns its cost, and the honest test to apply before you commission anything.

Updated July 8, 20268 min read3d, strategy, performance

Engineering

The 3D web stack, and how to pick from it

WebGL, Three.js, React Three Fiber, Spline, Unity, WebGPU. What each one is actually for, what it costs you, and the decision we would make in your position.

Updated July 1, 202611 min readthree.js, react-three-fiber, webgl

How we work

What a web studio actually does, and what it costs

Website quotes range from a few hundred to six figures for work that sounds identical on paper. Here is what the money is actually buying, which parts you can skip, and how to read a quote you have been handed.

June 17, 202610 min readpricing, working together, process

Opinion

Brand stories fail because they have no tension

Every brand claims to tell a story and almost none of them do. What is usually missing is not emotion or craft, it is a conflict the audience can feel, and something specific enough to be remembered.

Updated June 3, 20267 min readbrand, storytelling, positioning

Studio

Distribution for small teams: ship where the audience already is

Being everywhere is the default advice and it is wrong for small teams. What we learned putting seven games on Reddit instead of buying attention on five platforms at once.

May 13, 20268 min readdistribution, reddit, launch