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Manga Craft: a voxel world drawn like a hand-inked manga page. Ink · Block · Story.
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Light Tracing: shiny metal blocks reflecting the world around them.
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Light Tracing: lamps at night, reflected in the pool.
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Light Tracing: the Hill Town on the Water at noon, where every player starts.
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Light Tracing: the city at dawn, with low sun and long shadows between the houses.
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Light Tracing: a lava pool in a closed brick room. No lamps, only the lava's own glow.
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Light Tracing: an open wooden room, with sunlight coming in and bouncing off the floor.
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Light Tracing: sunlight through a pergola roof, casting traced shadows on the stone path.
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Light Tracing: a lavafall at night. The lava is the only light, and it glows on the grass around it.
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Light Tracing: a pond with ripples and caustics on the water.
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Light Tracing: the pool at night from above. Each lamp lights its own pool of light, and the rest stays dark.
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Light Tracing: the canal in the Hill Town on the Water, with real reflections in the water and traced shadows under the bridge.
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Light Tracing: a waterfall with its foam ring, and a lavafall behind it.
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Manga Craft app icon, 1024 × 1024.
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In-game screenshot on iPhone with Light Tracing on. The game plays in landscape, so this picture is turned upright.
Inspiration
Every voxel game looks like the same plastic toy. We wanted one that looks like a page somebody drew: black ink edges, screentone in the shadows, bold manga colour — and a world that tells a story instead of just being terrain. So the world is built from manga genres, and the treasure hidden in it is a set of nineteen statues worth crossing it for.
What it does
Manga Craft is a voxel world drawn like a hand-inked manga page.
- 19 story arcs, 4 lands each. Slice of Life meadows and rice terraces, Romance sakura hills, Samurai bamboo seas, Horror bone forests, Snow Country hot springs, Western mesas, Pirate coves, Mecha scrap yards, Isekai floating isles, Kaiju craters and more — each with its own blocks, trees, terrain and creatures.
- 19 Sealed Suits. Nineteen hand-designed buildings are hidden across the arcs — a castle on a plateau, a jade pavilion in a lake, a crash site, a stadium, an iron door in a sea cliff. Inside each stands a Sealed Suit statue. Mine it as one piece, carry it home, place it, and its aura boosts you.
- Mine, craft, build. Tools from wood to stone to gold that wear down, a crafting table, water that flows and falls, lava that burns, storms, and day and night.
- Creatures with their own daily life — and nobody in Manga Craft has a face. Not you, not the creatures.
- Play together over the internet. Host your world and a friend walks in with a Gate Key. Every world also has a Story Code that gives a friend the very same world.
- Light Tracing: an optional graphics mode with real reflections, traced shadows, lamps that light a room and glowing lava — with a free 10-day trial.
- Photo Mode with manga frames and stamps.
- The Real World: Real World packs give blocks and a seed in the game, while the studio — from its own revenue — pays for real trees, ocean plastic clean-up, CO2 capture or coral. Each purchase gets a reference number, and the totals are public at mangacraft.world/impact.
How we built it
Unity 6 with URP, written in C#. The manga look is a cel shader with an ink-edge pass and screentone; Light Tracing is our own compute-shader tracer that runs on phones. The world is generated from a single Story Code, so the same code always makes the same world, and only the player's changes are saved. Playing together runs on Unity Relay with our own small message protocol: a joining friend receives only the host's edits, never the map.
The whole game was driven headless: builds, a 207-check self-test, a layout audit of every screen at phone, tablet and desktop size, scripted play-tests and even the trailer shots all run from the command line, through a developer console that can drive the game without the editor.
RevenueCat
The RevenueCat SDK powers every purchase on both stores. The Store reads the current Offering at runtime, so prices, sales and packages change from the dashboard without an app update. What's for sale:
- The Pass ($3.99/month or $24.99/year): no sponsor pages, a small daily gift, suits reach twice as far, a monthly crate of building blocks.
- Light Tracing ($4.99, once), with a free 10-day trial.
- Suit loans, boosts and crates that sell a week, never power — every clock is visible and nothing sold touches luck or drop chance.
- Real World packs ($4.99–$99.99).
Zenii, the in-game currency, is earned only — it is never sold.
Sponsor pages (RevenueCat Ads + AdMob)
Adverts are sponsor pages: rewarded only, always opened by the player, never forced, never at a transition. Google AdMob serves them; RevenueCat counts and verifies them through the AdTracker, so advert income sits beside purchase income in one dashboard, and the reward is paid only on a completed view. They are non-personalised for everyone, so there is no tracking prompt and no advertising ID collected. They are capped each day, and a Pass holder is never offered one.
Challenges
- A traced-light mode fast enough for phones — it now runs at 120 fps with Light Tracing on on a Galaxy S23 Ultra.
- Distant land that stretches to the horizon without killing the frame rate.
- Online play that survives phones leaving the app.
- Keeping every store answer — privacy, advertising IDs, age rating — true to what the code really does.
Accomplishments
- A full voxel game on iPhone and Android: 19 arcs, 76 lands, 19 suit buildings, creatures, crafting, online play.
- A monetisation model where nobody can buy their way forward.
- Real trees planted and ocean plastic removed, paid for by the studio, with public receipts.
- The whole build shared in public on X (#BuildInPublic).
What we learned
Players and judges can tell when a promise is only in the copy. So every rule — "nothing sold is progress", "no tracking", "Zenii is earned" — is enforced in code and checked by the self-test.
What's next
More arcs, suits and creatures, and a Windows release.
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