The King's Aura

Game Logo

Inspiration

We're big fans of The King Is Watching, the mobile hit where the whole game is built around one twist: your attention (represented as a "gaze" you place) is the resource, not gold or wood. We wanted to build our own take on that idea rather than clone it. Digging into how the reference game actually works, we learned its gaze isn't a radius at all — it's a Tetris-shaped piece dropped onto a grid. That was the fork in the road: we kept the spirit (your focus is scarce, and where you put it is the whole game) but swapped the mechanic for something that fits a phone screen and one thumb — a circular aura the King physically carries around the battlefield. Simpler than the original, but ours.

What it does

King Aura TD is a portrait-mode, single-player tower defense. The King walks the map trailing a glowing aura, and only the buildings caught inside it are active — a Mine outside the aura earns nothing, a Barracks outside the aura trains nobody. You've got six building types split across economy (Mine, Lumber) and defense (Militia, Knight, Archer barracks, plus a Tower), two resources to juggle, and a King who fights back himself if enemies wander into his aura.

A run is six escalating waves — Bandits, Fighters, Giants, and a Champion boss finale — with a roguelike blessing pick between each wave and a risk/reward "Start Early" button for players who'd rather skip the prep time for a resource bonus. Wave 1 is a short guided tutorial (build a Lumber, learn the aura, build a Militia, build a Mine) so the core hook lands before the difficulty ramps.

How we built it

Every line was built by prompting, in a continuous back-and-forth with Claude across more than 40 tracked sessions, each one logged with what changed and why. The 2D Canvas/HTML5 build is the single source of truth for game logic; every stat, cost, and timing lives in one CONFIG object so a tuning conversation could always point at one exact line. We also ported the same logic to a couple of Three.js 3D experiments to see how the mechanic felt in 3D.

Art started as flat colored shapes and icons — that was enough to prove the loop was fun before spending any time on visuals. Once the core game was solid, we integrated a real pixel-art asset pack (buildings, troops, enemies, terrain, HUD icons) plus hand-picked art for things the pack didn't cover, like the King's projectile and UI cursors. Every visual change was verified with an actual rendered screenshot, not just a glance at the code — which mattered, because more than one "should work" change didn't.

Sprite is from Tiny Sword: https://pixelfrog-assets.itch.io/tiny-swords

Challenges we ran into

The art integration surfaced real bugs, not just style questions. One imported sprite turned out to have a fully opaque background instead of a transparent one, showing up as a stark white box until we ran a flood-fill pass to clean it up. An early attempt at giving the Archer a visible arrow — stretching the sprite across the full shot distance — distorted its shaft into an unrecognizable dashed line; we rebuilt it as a small icon that actually travels from bow to target instead. And swapping the flat dark background for a tiled grass field quietly broke the contrast on half a dozen UI elements (HP bars, the wave timer, even the joystick) that had been tuned for a near-black backdrop — that took a deliberate sweep to catch them all instead of fixing them one bug report at a time.

On the design side, the hardest problem was pacing: wave difficulty, the tutorial's length, starting resources, and enemy attack speed all needed several rounds of real playtesting (including on an actual phone over the local network, not just a resized browser window) before they felt right rather than just being numbers that looked reasonable on paper.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The core loop was fun before it was pretty — we protected that the whole way through, and never let an art or polish pass put the game in a broken or unplayable state. We're proud of catching subtle bugs (the opaque sprite, the distorted arrow, the invisible UI) by actually verifying renders instead of trusting that code which "should" work does. And we're proud of the build log itself: a real, continuous record of decisions, pivots, and lessons across the whole build.

What we learned

Find a way to transfer the feel of The King is Watching to mobile version is way more difficult than we thought. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses we must take into account when building the game mechanics