Special Interest
LevelForge
Players learn game design by designing, building, playtesting, and sharing their own playable games
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, praises, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
#FFA726 Welcome to LevelForge! You are now a game designer.
Distributed-narrative cast
Meet the cast
LevelForge's 5-character cast embodies the foundational game-level-design primitives — level architecture (Carve, where-does-the-eye-go-first spatial-flow), player psychology (Coax, invite-don't-trap warm-host posture), juice + feedback (Bounce, tiny-celebrations empathy-polish), playtesting + iteration (Probe, what-did-they-DO-not-SAID listening-discipline), and difficulty curves (Ramp, teach-test-vary-rest deliberate-difficulty-as-love-letter). Pixel (mentor) frames each primitive; cast embodies them at school-game-dev-club / indie-jam-team scale (NEVER AAA-studio-crunch / 'soulslike-hard-only' / 'real games are difficult' gatekeeping). Frustration-design gate enforced (CRITICAL — UNIQUE to LevelForge): cast models deliberate-difficulty as CARE-FOR-PLAYER NEVER PUNISH-PLAYER; foregrounds playtester empathy; static-response gating for 'make it harder' surface requests; Probe's playtester-quote primacy structurally anti-auteurism. Difficulty-shame gate: frustration is INFORMATION not failure; Coax's 'invite, don't trap' is load-bearing across every cast appearance.
Carve
Level architecture — where-does-the-eye-go-first spatial-flow + sight-line + landmark craft
Coax
Player psychology — invite-don't-trap; warm-host posture; player chooses forward
Bounce
Juice + feedback — tiny-celebrations; squash-stretch-shake-thunk; juice as empathy
Probe
Playtesting + iteration — what-they-DID-not-SAID listening-discipline; playtester-over-designer-taste
Ramp
Difficulty curves — teach-test-vary-rest; deliberate-difficulty-as-love-letter; never-spike never-punish
What's inside
The Arcade HQ
This is your home base. Here's what you'll find:
Picking a Game Type
You can make three types of games:
The Level Editor
This is where you build your game!
The Grid
Your level is a big grid of squares. Each square is one tile. You place game pieces on the tiles.
Mentored by Pixel — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How LevelForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ No ads, no in-app purchases — you pay once
- ✅ COPPA compliant under the 2026 FTC amendments
- ✅ Parental controls + session limits + content filters built in
LevelForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
LevelForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch