A half-dead blue troll brews gross potions above your Windows taskbar. Your typing is the spoon. A skull on the counter roasts him.
A grumpy troll brews potions on your taskbar. Your typing is the spoon.
Windows 10/11US$ 3.99Free demoAbout 18 h of playEN · PT-BR · ES
Witch Doctor's Hut02 / 13
03
How it plays
You work. He brews.
1. Type
2. Heat it
3. Sell, or blow it
Every key you press, in any program, stirs the cauldron. The game counts the rhythm, never what you write.
Steady rhythm climbs six stages: SIMMER, BUBBLING, ROILING, WITCHFIRE, STORMBREW, ANCESTRAL. Sparks, smoke, fireworks over your whole screen.
Type like a maniac and the pot boils over: BOOM, Vosk goes down face first. Sold potions pay the skull's rent.
Witch Doctor's Hut03 / 13
04
The troll and the skull
Two voices, one hut
Vosk. Blue swamp troll back from a war. Half a tusk, one good eye, a hole in his belly. He lands on a flaming cannonball in front of his uncle's hut. The sign says GONE ON VACATION. BACK SOMEDAY. MAYBE.
Old Teeth. The family's founding ancestor, now a skull with a candle on his head and opinions about everything. He keeps the books and takes the coins.
"Who let a half-dead troll in my hut?"
"Fine. Not a trespasser. A lodger. Lodgers pay rent, boy."
Witch Doctor's Hut04 / 13
05
Life in the hut
Game art, untouched
Potions: a line and a star rarity each
Ingredients: nothing arrives by itself
Gear: seven slots, bandages to shaman
42kinds of visitor
49recipes
34ingredients, all with art
5cauldrons
12blue runes that wake
Counts from teams/content.json and brew/rules.js05 / 13
06
Progression that respects attention
Simulated 30 h per player type
16 hengaged player reaches Witch Doctor
18 htypical player. Same for heavy typers and mouse-only
29 hplayer who never opens the shop. Slower, never stuck
0late rents in 6 profiles
142items ever held, 30 h engaged. It was 4,364 before the fix
Bot play2.js, 30 h per profile, seed 1, rules embedded in the game. Economy lab: mean of 3 seeds. Bots are not humans: a human test is still owed.
The main game. A transparent window above the taskbar, counting keys in any program. Portable exe built, about 280 MB. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, no account, no internet.
Click-through, draggable
Hides under fullscreen apps
Quit from the tray
Testing
Phone, in the browser
Tap to stir. A different product from the taskbar: short sessions, no keyboard. Treated as an experiment, with no store release promised.
Web build exists
App stores: not started
Mic features need HTTPS
Planned
Full-screen hut
A free update after launch: the whole hut in a big window, a door to new rooms. Not built yet. Keeps the taskbar game as the product and gives a second launch moment.
Free update, no date
Same save
Sandbox first
NIGHT-BACKLOG.md · MAPA-FUTURO.html07 / 13
08
Demo, early access, 1.0
Recommendation shown. The decision is Bruno's
Demo
Free
Trespasser to Apprentice, about 1.5 h
9 visitors, 2 cauldrons, 2 gear pieces
Same loop, same skull, 3 languages
No runes, no late ranks
Early access
Option, not advised
Today's whole 8-rank game
Promises updates a solo dev must keep
Splits the one big launch in two
Adds nothing the game still lacks
1.0
US$ 3.99
Eight promotions, about 18 h
42 visitors, 5 cauldrons, 12 runes
Free full-screen update after launch
Phone: experiment, no promise
Go straight to 1.0.Demo first, for wishlists and Next Fest. Launch the full game about a week after the festival, then the free full-screen update as the second beat. Early access stays as the fallback if the 1.0 checklist is not green by 10 January 2027.
RELEASE-PLAN.html08 / 13
09
Market and price
Estimates, with the doubt left in
Melvor Idle
~424k
Rusty's Retirement (~$7)
~320k
Ropuka's Idle Island ($3.99)
~91k
Median 2024 Steam release
~1.5k
Copies on Steam, Raijin estimates (medium confidence). Sources disagree by 2 to 15 times. Melvor is not a taskbar game. Our closest comp is Ropuka: same price, a game that sits on the desktop.
US$ 3.99
About US$ 2.79 net per sale after Steam's 30%, before tax and refunds. Launch discount 10%, never past 15%.
1,500 copies, no marketing: about US$ 4k
20,000 copies, plan followed: about US$ 56k (our hypothesis)
91,000 copies, Ropuka-level: about US$ 254k
Go or no-go: under 1,000 wishlists on 22 Feb, do not launch the week after
One person, one star. Bruno builds and decides everything that enters the game. An AI-assisted pipeline does the heavy lifting: art, voices, balance bots and QA scripts, all declared openly.
Art made with AI tools, then cut, aligned and edited by hand
Voices and some music generated, English voice only
Every economy change is played by bots before it ships
Pixel and material rules written down in STANDARDS.md
Bellatrix is a blue giant star in Orion: the studio's home sky
Witch Doctor's Hut11 / 13
12
What we ask
Four small things
1
Wishlist it
When the Steam page opens, one click. It is the number the whole launch hangs on.
2
Play the demo
About 90 minutes. Tell us where you stopped, and why.
3
Show it
Creators and press can ask for a key. The game is made to be seen in a clip.
4
Test it cold
One honest 30 minute run on a clean Windows PC, antivirus on.
TODO Bruno: tune this slide to the audience (press, creators, publisher)
Witch Doctor's Hut12 / 13
Bellatrix Forge Studios
He came back from the war. He landed on your taskbar.
Bellatrix Forge Studios presents
