The one-person studio of Shean Stanks. Fifteen hand-built browser games (no engine, no ads, no installs), three books, two tabletop games, and a pier of Unity imports. It all runs in your browser.
Every cabinet below is a single HTML file — click Play and you're in. Saves live in your browser. Keyboard games need a real keyboard; the mouse-only ones are phone-friendly. (DeepStone is the one exception: it lives at its own address while its playtest runs.)
CLOSED PLAYTESTHire a party, harvest souls, beat the Deep's closing clock.
Lead one delver and a hired band of companions — each with a mind of their own — into a vast labyrinth that seals itself floor by floor behind you. Absorb the souls of what you slay to steal their powers, and when you fall, what you learned outlives you.
The world is the skill tree.
There are no classes and no skill points — the swamp poisoning you is teaching you to endure it, and the fire you swing is teaching you to wield it. Push ever deeper, because a danger you've already mastered has nothing left to teach.
Every league you sail, the wind names the price.
Captain a pirate ship across a vast ASCII sea: read the wind, land raking broadsides, storm enemy decks blade in hand, and dig up buried gold. Hunt the pirate lords who each carry a piece of a sundered treasure chart.
Move or cast — never both.
Lead a coven of four spellcasters through branching cursed realms where every hero must choose each turn: step, or unleash. Build deep spellbooks where upgrades reshape magic itself — a bolt becomes a burst, frost learns to chain, fire starts raising the dead.
One tank of fuel. It only burns when you move.
Pilot a lone salvage sub through a drowned labyrinth where a single fuel gauge is your health, your lamplight, and your ticket home. Treasure drags behind you on a tow line — nothing counts until you haul it back to the dock.
One wax meter is your life, your moveset, and your clock.
You didn't drown over the sea — you fell through it, into the sunken labyrinth Daedalus built. Your wings' wax rules everything: run cold to cling and cut, warm to glide and ride the drafts, hot to melt what's sealed.
It hurts on the way out — and on the way back.
Toxic waste is mutating the outback, and Jack's boomerang is the only answer. It deals damage on the throw AND the return, so every toss is a spacing puzzle — take down eight mutant bosses, from a boxing roo to a fire-breathing komodo on a motorcycle, and claim their weapons.
Drift one way, aim another, and take back the eight Reaches.
A real-time ASCII space shooter where momentum doesn't care which way your nose points: thrust in one direction, swing your guns in another. Roam a wheel of 74 star systems, refit in port, and pry the Shards from the Wardens who hold them.
Raise the lamp and it goes blind — and comes running.
A first-person horror crawl drawn entirely in flowing ASCII, where your lantern decides what hunts you. Burn bright and the thing in the dark can't see you — but that's exactly when it moves fastest.
No mana. Time is the only resource.
Roam a fantasy realm dueling rivals for their cards in a battle system where every card costs beats on a shared timeline — cheap spells let you act again at once, big ones hand your foe the clock. Stack your creatures onto the same beat and they strike together in a ringing chord.
A language you must learn to read — and the world obeys it.
No combat, no hero, no stats — just a cursor, an open world, and a written language seeded fresh for every save, so no walkthrough can ever hold your answers. Decipher the glyphs and the fire, water, and stone around you start listening.
Your only verb is scent. The colony does the rest.
Steer a side-view ant colony through four seasons by painting pheromones — attract, repel, rally, dig, seal. You never command a single ant; you shape the instincts of hundreds and hope the nest is deep enough when winter comes.
Four heroes. Ten floors. One deathless king.
Command a wizard, warrior, cleric, and rogue through grid-tactics battles where every number is exact — no dice, no misses, no excuses. Permadeath has teeth here: lose your rogue and every locked chest in the tomb stays locked forever.
Descend five strata by torchlight. Claim the Cinder Throne.
A dark dungeon crawler where the light is a resource and the noise you make is an invitation. Ration your torches, feed your hunger any way you dare, and shape a doomed wretch from grim spells and grimmer skills on the long climb down.
PROTOTYPESettle the frontier. The Debt always comes to collect.
An early playable prototype of a grim frontier strategy game: claim hexes that pay out every turn, raise walls and levies, and brace yourself — the Warden's Collections arrive on schedule, and the Debt only grows. Survive ten and the land is yours.
The Unity side of town, shipped through itch.io. Stardust Ranger docks right here — the others play over at the port.
PROTOTYPEFresh from the shipyard — unreleased anywhere else.
An asteroids-RPG prototype straight off the workbench. Blast through the belt, grow your ranger, and play a build that hasn't shipped anywhere but this pier.
Vampire Survivors clone but simple — and maybe multiplayer?
Hold out against the swarm in a stripped-down survivors-like. Plays right in the browser on its itch.io page.
Play as the first zombie in the apocalypse.
Harvest the brains but don't die from hunger. You're not surviving the outbreak — you ARE the outbreak. Plays in the browser on itch.io.
Hand-drawn pixel UI for a space game.
Health tanks, fuel bars, minimaps, sliders, HUDs — the full cockpit, drawn pixel by pixel. Name your own price on itch.io.
Books by Shean Stanks — complete, free, and readable right here. No sign-ups, no samples that cut off at chapter three.
Torin is a farm boy thrust into a quest to find the rightful heir to a stolen throne — while discovering the magic manifesting within him. 32 chapters + epilogue.
Two high-school sweethearts try to make a relationship work when one of them keeps having to save the world. Date nights are hard to schedule. 40 chapters + epilogue.
The story behind the card game: Catherine hunts the truth about the Order and tries to escape Casterlin in one piece. A short story in 4 chapters.
Physical games — printed on demand at The Game Crafter, or free where noted.
The first RPG board game set in the world of Nara. Born from one question — what if Outward was a board game? Explore, gear up, survive.
A nine-card werewolf hunt: grab silver bullets, patch up your friends, and shoot blindly into the dark. Designed, made, and finished within 24 hours of the idea. Plays in under ten minutes — and free print-and-play files live on the same Game Crafter page.
In production… the shrines are being carved. Check back.
Not everything in town is a game.
Sheet music that's still yours in 2040.
Write, hear, and print real sheet music in a single file that runs in your browser — no account, no install, no subscription. From lead sheets to four-part hymns to piano scores, your music lives in an open format built to outlast everything else.
Six colors of free alternate digital art proxies.
Card layouts by Shean, backgrounds made with a licensed AI toolkit; card content belongs to Wizards of the Coast. Free for personal play — please don't sell or redistribute them.
Not "is it good?" — is it worth a busy dad's evening?
A review format for people with no time: whether a game respects your hours matters more than whether critics liked it. On the Shean Stanks channel.
Ever since I can remember, I was always on the lookout for new hobbies and activities to keep myself busy. I have been making games since I was young — board games, card games, and now a whole arcade of browser games. I was always a creative person and I love making things: games are such a fun and simple way to express myself, and I'm able to quickly materialize my ideas and make them a reality.
Every video game on this site is a single hand-built HTML file — no engine, no framework, no tracking, no ads. If it's fun, that's the whole business model.
Say hello: gambajoji@gmail.com · YouTube · The Game Crafter