GFR Games // a DBA of Threat Tape LLC

GFR Games

STUDIO:: GFR Games
STATUS:: Six on the bench
CATALOG:: Vector Death · Drifter · Trench Defense · Roc · D20 Craps · The World Dungeon
CONFIDENCE:: Mixed. Some shipped, some abandoned, some still cooking.
UPDATE CADENCE:: Whenever something is worth showing

// WHAT WE BUILD

Thirty years in and around the gaming industry, and it turns out the habit doesn't wash off. Some of these started at 2 a.m. because they sounded fun and then wouldn't let go. Some started because I wanted to play something nobody had built yet. Both are legitimate reasons to build a game. Here's what's on the bench.

// The board

Vector Death

Eight ships. One tunnel. Half of them coming the other way.

Eight pilots, anti-grav ships, one enclosed tunnel. The catch: half of them are coming the other way. This isn't racing where you dodge your rivals, it's racing where you hunt them, plasma weapons and all. I built it on the bones of the games I lost whole weekends to, WipeOut XL's lethal elegance and Red Planet's cult brutality. Every lap is a game of chicken at impossible speed. The crowd didn't pay to watch you cross the line. They paid to see who's left.

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Drifter

The galaxy's wide open, the ports are unguarded, and the only law is what your guns can enforce.

The galaxy's wide open, the ports are unguarded, and the only law out here is whatever your guns can enforce. Trade rare cargo across thousands of sectors and build an empire one port at a time, or skip the paperwork and become the pirate everyone warns their kids about. Form corporations, fight wars over hyperlanes, or keep your head down and quietly out-earn every fleet that crosses you. It's the BBS classic that ate my teenage years, rebuilt for your pocket: persistent, ruthless, and it never pauses just because you logged off.

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Trench Defense

They don't stop. They don't sleep. One trench, a few towers, and your nerve.

The enemy's coming. They don't stop, they don't sleep, and the only thing between them and everything behind you is one trench, a few towers, and your nerve. Dig in with WWI machine guns, dig out with future-tech turrets, and hold the line while the AI probes every weak point you left it. Pathfinding enemies find the gap. Status effects stack. The next wave is always worse than the last. I'm building this one with my kid, which makes it the most important thing on this list, the game's half of it, the building it together is the rest.

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Roc

Grandma's card table, rebuilt for your phone.

Grandma's card table, rebuilt for your phone. Roc is Rook reborn: bid bold, call your partner's bluff, drop a trump at exactly the wrong moment for everybody else. Play solo against AI that runs from "kindly aunt" to "the cousin who counts every card and never lets you forget it," or go online against real people in real time. And every regional house rule your family used to argue about at Thanksgiving? It's in there. Pick your variant and play it the way you grew up swearing was the only correct way.

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D20 Craps

Craps is just odds and probability. So what happens if you run the whole thing on d20s?

This one started at a Dragon Con afterparty, more or less. I asked a friend who teaches math for a living, "craps is just odds and probability, so what happens if you run the whole thing on d20s instead of d6s?" Neither of us could let it go. I went home and worked out a full rule set: roll 2d20, and 21 becomes the new 7, the number that wins you the come-out and the number that craps you out once your point is set. Point bands, hardways from 1-1 all the way to 20-20, field bets, true-odds plays with zero house edge. Same heartbeat as the felt in Vegas, rebuilt for people who'd rather roll a d20.

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The World Dungeon

The floors collapse on a timer. The audience is real. Death is a promotion.

What would an honest MMO adaptation of Dungeon Crawler Carl actually look like? Not a reskin with achievement jokes bolted on — the real thing: a seasonal crawl where everyone starts on Floor 1 together, death is permanent but doesn't log you out (the dead become the audience, and the audience is the economy), and the whole show runs on a dungeon AI with a voice bible and a mean streak. I designed the entire game on paper — the showrunner engine, the card game, the monetization that refuses to be predatory because the books would never forgive it — and then built the opening hour as an Infocom-style text game, because a design that lives or dies on its writing voice should have to prove the voice first. Play your last ordinary hour on Earth. Take your time in the house. Mind the convertible.

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