Rituals, not presets
50/10 tells you nothing about when to reach for it.
Deep Code does. Cadences are named for the work they
suit, so you choose by what you are about to do.
A Tool by The Prodigal Developers Out now
Forge
Most focus timers assume every 25 minutes is the same 25 minutes. Game development does not work like that.
Debugging wants short, sharp loops. Modelling wants long uninterrupted stretches. And the only date that really matters is the next build. Forge is a Pomodoro timer rebuilt around how games actually get made.
- Platform
- Android
- Built with
- Flutter
- Network
- None at all
- Price
- One-time
The Premise
Not a generic Pomodoro app
Four things separate Forge from a countdown with a nice font. Each one exists because the studio needed it, not because a feature list wanted it.
Disciplines on every block
Code, Art, Design, Audio, Level, Build, Playtest, Debug, Ship, Admin. Tagging the work is what lets Forge answer the question it exists for: where did the week actually go?
Estimates that get honest
Tasks are sized in focus blocks, because blocks are the unit the timer pays out in. Forge measures the gap and hands you the multiplier: you estimated 4 — plan for 7.
The milestone, in view
A project carries the thing you owe it and the date. “Vertical Slice · 12 days left” sits above the timer all day, and turns red inside three.
Cadences
Six rituals, or invent your own
Pick by the shape of the work in front of you. The arithmetic is a consequence, not the choice.
-
15/3
Bug Hunt
Short loops so you resurface and re-read the stack trace instead of staring through it.
-
50/10
Deep Code
Long enough to hold a whole system in your head at once.
-
45/15
Asset Grind
Modelling, texturing, rigging — long hands-on stretches with a real break after.
-
30/10
Playtest
Play, take notes, fix, play again. Sized to a session you can actually recall.
-
25/5
Sprint
The classic, kept for a mixed day of small unrelated tasks.
-
90/20
Milestone
A push before a build deadline. Deliberately uncomfortable. Use sparingly.
What You Get Back
The week, answered
-
A devlog you did not have to write
When a block ends, Forge asks for one line while the context is still in your head — and the break is already running, so writing it costs nothing. Export a day as Markdown, straight into standup.
-
Your hours, on a wheel
Finished blocks plotted around 24 hours. Most people are wrong about when they are sharpest, and this is the screen that says so.
-
Streaks and an 18-week heatmap
A daily block goal, a running streak, and a consistency grid that makes a bad fortnight impossible to argue with.
-
Correct with the app closed
A running phase is stored as an absolute end instant, so nothing is ever counting down — background the app, kill it, leave it overnight, and the timer is still right. Alerts are scheduled for the instant a block ends, which is the whole point when the phone is face down.
The App
Seven screens
Tap any shot to enlarge it.
Craft
The details you only notice on the tenth day
Chimes, not blips
The alert tones are struck-bell sounds synthesised for this app — inharmonic partials, exponential decay. A finished session should sound like something completed, not like a message arrived. They duck your music rather than stopping it.
The studio's pattern
The facet field behind the app is a port of the background you are looking at right now — same generator, same seed. The phone and this page draw the same pattern, not two that resemble each other.
Reduced motion, honoured
Turn it on and the ambient loops stop. State changes still transition, just faster, so nothing teleports. There is also a keep-awake mode for when the dial sits glanceable beside your machine.
Private by construction
No account. No ads. No subscription. No analytics. Everything lives in one file on your device.
This is verifiable rather than asserted: Forge does not hold the internet permission. It cannot phone home, because it has no transport with which to do so. You paid once — that is the whole deal.
Built by an indie game studio, for our own studio first.