Handler

Inspiration

I'm a lapsed XCOM / Darkest Dungeon player who now games almost entirely on a phone, and nothing there respects that taste. Gacha dangles characters I never bond with; idle tycoons grow numbers with nothing at stake; cozy sims are pleasant and weightless. I wanted a 15-minute mobile game where a single decision actually matters. So, I flipped the spy fantasy: you're not the agent in the field, you're the Handler at the desk who has to live with the calls.

What it does?

HANDLER is a 1960s Cold War spy-management sim. You run the night desk of a never-named British intelligence service, recruit and equip a roster of field agents, dispatch them on operations that run in real time, and make the live call when a mission turns. Agents are permanently losable, so the management you do is exactly what earns, or wastes, the drama.

How we built it?

This is a pre-production design package, not a build: a Game Design Document, Player Journey Map, Visual Concept Package, and Production Plan. I designed the systems and the economy on paper, wrote the dossier-noir copy, locked a visual identity (palette, type, and a "sacred red" rule where red appears only at true loss), and produced editable mockups and diagrams, leaning on AI tools to move fast (Claude for design thinking and copy, Gemini / Google Labs Flow for art).

Challenges I ran into

The hard part was making four artifacts tell one coherent story, consistent agent names, resource labels, room names, and an economy whose numbers matched the art. The core design challenge was making permadeath feel earned rather than like cheap RNG in a management game; the answer was to let a management choice (spending Intel to scout) unlock the third, safer option on the live call, so the drama is something you cause, not something that happens to you.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

The perspective inversion, making the desk, not the field, the fantasy. A closed loop where every system feeds the next, UI that carries mechanical meaning rather than just decoration, a colour language disciplined enough that red is reserved for loss alone, and a quantified economy where the agents are the economy.

What I learned?

Coherence beats polish: four beautiful artifacts that quietly disagree score worse than rougher ones that line up. And for a management sim, "the economy is the engine" is literal, the feeling of an economy isn't enough, you have to show the math.

What would be next for Handler?

Build the MVP, one chapter, the core loop, permanent stakes, and validate the two riskiest bets (does permadeath feel good here, and does a management call earn the drama) before any content scales. After that: reach. A global campaign climbing the enemies across continents, a roster of a hundred-plus, and the long life of an agent, legacy roles, prestige, and mentor lineages.

Built With

• chatgpt
• claude
• gemini
• googleflow