What comes in the box — secret allegiances, playable characters, and the threats and supplies waiting out in the field.
We're still hard at work on this part of Carrier, refining the mechanics and art before it's ready to share. What you're looking at right now is a placeholder standing in for the real content. Expect balance passes, visual polish, and playtesting feedback to shape what eventually goes here. We didn't want to leave this section empty while everything else comes together. Check back soon — this page will be updated as soon as it's ready.
Entries documenting the build — origins, mechanics, art, and playtests. Tap a title to preview it.
Too Many Characters ended with a promise to cut the roster down. Here's the actual rework: eighteen characters, one mechanical job per faction, and abilities that cost something instead of running out.
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The complete 4.1 record: why every character got repainted, the shift from usage counters to cost and timing, the new MARK mechanic, and every ability rewrite for all eighteen characters.
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Combat now comes down to face-down cards and tiered weapon math — reveal, tally the damage against the horde's threshold, and hope no one on the strike team is a Carrier hiding a -3 Sample sabotage.
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Encounter draws kept colliding with mid-turn trades and surprise Carrier reveals. We rebuilt the turn around a strict Pre-Draw Action Window and a Shared Group Inventory, so every action resolves before a card is drawn.
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Zero-friction setup and the 89-card overhaul — the box went from 198 cards and minutes of sorting to a 30-second setup.
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Consecutive superpowers were breaking the game. We introduced a cycling Day/Night round structure and dedicated phase indicators on every character card to pace the power curve and eliminate mid-game timing chaos.
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A V3 playtest made it obvious — we kept expanding the character roster, and it just turned redundant.
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Secret roles are now grouped under two simple sides, Survivors and Carriers, each with a name banner and a fresh pose.
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A behind-the-scenes story about how Carrier began — what inspired it, our design goals, and where it's headed.
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A mini retrospective on the break, and what's next for development.
Read more →The archive — prototype shots, card art, cut characters, table setups from every playtest, and the covers from each journal entry.
Follow us on Instagram → @kodecco.games Photos coming soon — tap to visit the profile in the meantime.Where the project stands, and what's coming next.
Defined the horde mechanic and core survival loop. Completed.
First Draft
Idealisation
Support Kits
Border & ZombiesMidjourney was still pretty new back then, and I was curious enough to test it out on these early concepts — some of these backgrounds and assets are AI-generated because I simply couldn't paint scenes like this myself yet. It is what it is; just part of the trail that led to where Carrier's art is now. Our early playtests also ran WAY too long — each game dragged on forever, and that's when we knew we had to go back to the drawing board.
First playable version built and tested with friends. Completed.
Home Printing
Sleeved Cards
Print Shop Finish
Characters Intro
Secret role card fromThis is also around when we started moving away from Midjourney and began drawing things ourselves — squeezing in art sessions during whatever free time we had. We still cut corners where we could (outfits especially), but from here on, the art was ours.
Overhauling the game's mechanics — optimizing systems and cutting redundancies, not building a whole new game. Running structured playtests to tune difficulty and pacing along the way.
Characters
Secret Roles
Encounters
Special ConditionsWe're deep in balancing right now — tightening up Characters, Secret Roles, Encounters, and Special Conditions. Some of it is trimming redundancy, some of it is fixing confusing naming, and some of it is just making sure every card earns its place in the deck.
As our design skills grow, we're moving further from the original Midjourney/AI-assisted art — toward asset packs from itch.io, and eventually hiring dedicated pixel art artists.
Art Direction
Horde Overhaul
Old Box Render
New Box (v1)
New Box (v2)Art is getting more refined with every pass — the survivor and horde designs are both being pushed further through repetition, and the box art has been completely redone from the old placeholder render to a real, finished design.
Bringing Carrier to a real print run — box, components, and a crowdfunding campaign. Not yet dated.
Coming SoonNothing is locked in yet. Before any campaign goes live we want the rules stable, the card count settled, and the production quote signed off — announcing a date before those three things are true is how good games get shipped badly. Subscribe below and you'll hear it here first.
"Every playtest tore the game apart a little more — and a little closer to what it needed to be."
— Playtest Notes, Session #7New journal entries and playtest calls, sent when there's something worth reading.
