Toll
They had the idea and none of the means. Both halves were built here.
toll-the-game.vercel.app (opens in a new tab)Toll is a browser-based card battler: a story mode, practice matches, a gacha system, an archive of characters and NPCs, and an events and news feed that keeps the world moving between updates.
The battle system is the weight of it. Characters carry distinct kits, and the work is not in any single ability but in how kits behave against one another and against the AI — a problem that grows faster than the number of characters does.
Every asset in it was generated in-house rather than commissioned: characters, environments, items and props.
A group of freelancers wanted to make the game they kept not finding — pieces they liked from a dozen others, pulled together with its own story and its own cast. What they did not have was an artist, or anyone who could turn mechanics into working code.
So both were built here. The art comes out of the studio's generation pipelines; the systems were written from scratch. The hard part was never the art — it was making character kits interact with each other and with the AI, which is where a card game either works or falls apart.
It is still growing. Character art is currently moving from one static image each to six or seven.
- 13 routes — story, practice, gacha, events, news, and a character and NPC archive
- A card battle system where character kits interact with one another and with the AI
- BattleArena alone runs to 1,520 lines
- Gacha mechanics with a browsable character archive by card number
- Motion through both GSAP and Framer Motion
- Sound via Howler
- Error monitoring in production through Sentry
- Every visual asset generated in-house — see The Lab