PawGuardians

Paw Guardians (Pati Koruyucuları) is a cozy idle game about reviving grandpa Ekin's dog shelter — you rescue real Turkish street-dog breeds, care for them, and adopt them out to families. It is my project outside engineering: I wanted to see what an engineer's habits — systems thinking, a designed economy, clean state — do in a completely different medium. I designed and built the game's core systems and directed everything else, leaning on AI tools where they are genuinely strong: Gemini for the raster art and for drafting whole gameplay systems, alongside AI-assisted implementation. It is deliberately wholesome — no dark patterns, no manufactured urgency — and ships as a native iOS app.

The game is a single-file vanilla-JavaScript engine — no framework, no build step — with all state in one object and localStorage persistence, wrapped for iOS in a WKWebView so the phone keeps full feature parity with zero porting. The parts that need an engineer's care are the ones I own: a twin-currency economy where spendable and multiplier-feeding balances never cross-contaminate, a save system that whitelists every persisted field explicitly so nothing silently breaks on reload, and a progression curve tuned to stay generous rather than exploitative. Working alongside AI collaborators meant building guardrails — conventions and reviews so AI-generated systems slot into the economy and persistence rules instead of breaking them. It is as much about directing a codebase as writing one.