Ali SaraçSolo product engineer, Istanbul

Messaging with no internet. It came out of a holiday where the hotel's connection was so bad we could not send each other a photo while sitting side by side, so it links the phones directly, with no server in between.

A home screen built around pickups, not screen time. No widgets, no icons, no wallpaper: what you mean to do today, how many times you have picked up the phone, and the six tools you actually use.

A path through the 137-word language, ten minutes a day. I wanted to learn it myself; since I was building the path anyway, I wanted others to be able to walk it too.

A fully offline tarot app with 78 cards. It actually began as a test of local image generation on my old gaming PC: a deck whose 78 cards must all look like one hand is a good exam.

Classic partners Spades and five more variants, drawn as a paper score pad rather than a casino: bags are pencil strokes, a broken nil is struck through, the winner's total is ringed in pencil.

Batak in four modes on a felt table under a lamp. After every hand you read it back card by card: what you played, what the engine would have played, and in how many deals it was right.

Classic Hearts and three more variants, drawn as a cross-stitch sampler on linen: every heart you take is stitched onto your tag, and a player going for the moon gets a small crescent.

Euchre with partners and three more variants on a pale pine table. When trump is made the left bower jumps into your trumps: you don't read the rule, you watch it happen.

A roguelike deckbuilder rooted in the Turkic epics. Both a test of producing every piece of a game's art as if it came from one hand, and a door into Dede Korkut and Manas.

A calm matching puzzle in İznik ceramic and Old Turkic runes. I wanted a game of the kind my wife likes, and it is also where I tried advertising for the first time, by setting the limits first.

Classic sudoku, nothing more. Difficulty is graded by the technique a board demands rather than the number of blanks: choosing Hard gets you a genuinely hard board, not an easy one with more holes.

A sliding puzzle where you clear what's called, not what you can. Every one of the 400 boards was generated offline and solved end to end before it was chosen; there is no unsolvable board.

A deckbuilder built on poker hands. The real test was the audio: I tried generating music and effects locally, most of it was thrown out, and a reusable library is what stayed.

I caught myself spinning my watch bezel for no reason and decided it might as well do something. A falling-block puzzle rethought from scratch for a round screen.

The question after Kiln: what is the purest game the same input can make? The bezel gives you one thing, an angle. You find the single opening in Saturn's rings and pass through it, and there is no second mechanic.

The third one gave up the screen entirely. You crack a safe by vibration alone: blind mode is the real game, and a side effect is that it can be played with your eyes shut.

An artillery game for the watch: the bezel is the barrel's pin, the planet pulls the shell. It came from asking whether the loop of Worms, which I loved — aim, miss, correct — would fit on a wrist.