Games / Made with kids
Making a game with kids (who are also the QA department)
Power Kittens is our rescue game for roughly ages four to seven: an orange firefighter kitten drives a fire truck across a hilly town, finds the fires, and puts them out with a hose you aim with a second finger. It's free, it's completely ad-free, and it was built with small children in the loop from the first prototype — because a four-year-old will tell you the truth about your game within nine seconds.
What it teaches (on purpose)
- Synonyms, spoken aloud. The game says words out loud and plays with their synonyms, so kids hear that "big," "huge," and "enormous" are cousins — vocabulary by play, not flashcard.
- Counting. Numbers show up as things worth counting — fires left, kittens saved — the way kids actually learn them: attached to something they care about.
- Cause and effect, gently. Aim the hose, fire goes out, town gets better. No fail states designed to sting, no timers designed to panic. Calm is a feature.
What designing with kids actually changes
Everything, it turns out. Adults tolerate menus; kids treat every menu as a locked door. So there nearly aren't any. Adults read; four-year-olds don't — so the game speaks. Adults have reliable Wi-Fi; the back seat of a car doesn't — so the whole game works offline. Adults ignore ads; kids can't — so there are none, and never will be. Watching a small child play your build is the most brutal and productive playtest in the industry, and it's the reason this game feels the way it does.
The parent deal, in plain words
| Thing | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Price | Free to play. A one-time purchase (no subscription) unlocks a big pack of extra levels — pay once, done. |
| Ads | None. Not now, not "rewarded," not ever. |
| Data | No trackers. The game runs entirely on the device; an optional parent email exists only to carry progress across devices. |
| Offline | Yes — loads once, then works without a connection. |
Made by a tiny studio, with big tools
Power Kittens comes from the same small workshop as Plops, built the same way — humans holding the design, AI coding models doing the heavy lifting (here's how that works). The kids' contribution is the part no model can fake: laughing at the right moments, and getting bored with absolute honesty.
Play Power Kittens → It's free; hand over the tablet and watch what they do.