Kugle: cosy gravity-platformer party game
Kugle is a cosy gravity-platformer party game, online and playable cross-platform on smartphone and PC.
Play with your friends in a cute galaxy where gravity knows no bounds: collect, care for, play with, breed and trade colourful little creatures known as Kugles.
What I did
This page is about the game: what Kugle is, how it plays, its modes, its players.
What I did on it is told in detail on the Kugle Corp page: five years as founder, CEO and CTO of the studio that made Kugle, and as its lead gameplay programmer.
See what I did: founder, CEO, CTO, lead programmer →Key features
Kugle mixes Tamagotchi, Pokémon and Mario Galaxy. You are a geneticist caring for your Kugles and bringing a polluted universe back to life:
- Daily care: feed your Kugle and look after it every day to help it evolve.
- Breed: create the Kugle of your dreams, with unlimited combinations of elements.
- Game modes: challenge friends and other players in modes where your skills and your Kugle's powers make the difference.
- Explore: open worlds where gravity has no limits. Solve puzzles and join events to collect resources for your Kugles.
Online & competitive game modes
Races and tournaments run on online game servers (server-authoritative, spun up on demand), built on our own "Gravity 3D platformer" engine.
Released cross-platform on iOS, Android (Google Play), the Epic Games Store and Steam (Windows & macOS).
One build tool I made ships every release to all four stores from one place.
Monetization
Kugle is free to play, with two currencies:
- Diamonds: the everyday currency, bought or earned in events.
- GU: the premium one, earned in tournaments and the Battle Pass, or bought.
Players spend them on:
- breeding & hatching: the cost scales with the Kugle's generation,
- boosters & cosmetics: tied to monthly events,
- the Battle Pass.
Players & community
Kugles are cute, and that alone pulls people in: kids talk about them at school, adults buy the figurines at trade shows. Core players go deeper: breeding for rare combinations, world records, live tournaments.
Players around the world
Kugle installs well beyond France: Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia and Argentina are among the top countries, with no local marketing. Next step: Asia-Pacific, in 14 languages, on the local stores.
NFC figurines
In the path of Pokémon, Amiibo and Skylanders: each iKugle figurine has an NFC chip that brings a Kugle into the game, the twin of the figure in your hands, or a rare surprise.
At trade shows people buy them and ask for plush toys in shops: the first step of Kugle as an IP beyond the screen.
Technical side: what Kugle is made of
Kugle looks like a cute mobile game. Underneath, it is five products that have to work as one: a game, its online servers, an API, a set of smart contracts, and the pipeline that ships all of it to four stores. I chose that architecture, built a large part of it and led the people who built the rest.
| Layer | Made with | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Game client | Unity (URP), C#, FMOD, Addressables | The game on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, on our own gravity engine |
| Game servers | Unity headless on Linux, Mirror over WebSockets | Online races and worlds, server-authoritative, started on demand by the API |
| API | Node.js, TypeScript, Express | Accounts, creatures, shop, loot, tournaments, leaderboards; checks every payment; starts and stops the game servers |
| Data | MongoDB, Redis, Amazon S3 | Players and their progress, the game servers running, the pictures of the creatures |
| Sign-in and wallet | Thirdweb | Login with an email, a phone, Google, Apple or Discord; every player gets a wallet with account abstraction, no seed phrase |
| Payments | Stripe, PayPal, App Store, Google Play | Card and in-app purchases, each one checked by the API before anything is delivered |
| Smart contracts | Solidity, Foundry, OpenZeppelin | Creatures and eggs as NFTs (ERC-721), three tokens (ERC-20), boosters, shop, player marketplace, staking, breeding, tournaments; on Immutable zkEVM |
| Website and dashboard | Next.js, React | Web shop, wallet pages, and the admin dashboard that runs the live game |
| Tournaments | N3MUS | Monthly competitions, ranked on the scores of our game servers |
Gallery
