I didn't want to build one game, so I built a whole portal, and the pixel-art pipeline to feed it

Instead of building one game, I built a portal to hold many of them. All at once. I know how that sounds.

I like games, not just playing them, but taking them apart to see how they work, and I've built my own little engines over the years to mess around. So when AI turned into a real force multiplier, I pointed it at the whole idea of a game portal instead of a single game.

It's called PixelDen, and the interesting part isn't any single game. It's the machinery underneath.

Phaser 4, plus a 2.5D layer I bolted on

I run the games on Phaser. I've got good history with it, and version 4 took real leaps. It's a serious framework now, small and flexible, no giant UI full of buttons to learn. On top of it I built an extra layer that handles 2.5D, because I wanted more than flat sprites without dragging in a full 3D engine.