Hello, this is us and this is Box Directive

Who am I – Andy Zatorski – Design Director & Co-founder

Hi, I’m Andy, one of the co-founders of FOUNDRY². I’m responsible for the pixel art, UX/UI and art direction of our game, Box Directive.

In my day-to-day job, I’m a Design System Manager and UX designer. I enjoy breaking things down and figuring out how they work, finding their issues, then building them back up to be more efficient. My profession naturally lends itself to the way I approach creating game assets.

I’ve always wanted to design a game, something that I’ve put my passion into, and that hopefully shows in the art I produce. With this blog, I want to document my process, share my successes and, probably more importantly, share my failures, as I believe that’s where we learn the most.

Who am I – Jamie Agnew – Lead Programmer & Co-founder

Hi, I’m Jamie, the Co-founder of FOUNDRY² and handling the programming and game design for our first game, Box Directive.

My current day-to-day profession is as a construction project manager, quite the far cry from video game development, but as game development was something I studied at university, it’s the one thing I’ve always wanted to delve back into and build something enjoyable and hopefully form a small community around.

I reside in West Yorkshire with my lovely wife and two children, one of whom has started his very own journey into game development and programming.

Our About section details why we’ve started FOUNDRY² but as a whole, we want to try and start up something we are passionate about and grow it into something great. 

Welcome to Box Directive – Programming Update

We’ve had several ideas for games; however, Box Directive is the first we’ve fully taken through the prototype stage and then committed to fleshing out and getting the game out into the hands of others.

Box Directive is an incremental game about working your way through an increasingly strange packaging operation, creating boxes, shipping orders, upgrading your workstation and trying to become the company’s most productive employee.

Initial development started in March 2026 but has ramped up in recent months as the idea became more fleshed out and more focused on what the overall game should be.

The game’s major systems are coming together nicely. We have the working save and load system in place, our initial ‘packing stations’ are in the scene and working, the ability to actually build and ship a box (always useful…) and I’m part way through implementing the upgrade system to allow the player to spend some of the rewards they have earned through being an effective worker…

During a recent meeting about the game (which took place on a carousel at a family day out), we made some useful decisions on how we approach box stations, consumables and skills. As such, my next couple of weeks will focus on tidying up the upgrade system to work with these changes before then moving on to skill trees and prestige. Once those are in place we essentially have the full game loop in place ready to refine and build upon.

We’re still finding our feet in the big wide world of indie development, and learning plenty of new systems and ways of doing things as we go, but we are committed to providing regular updates on the project, growing this community and delivering something hopefully enjoyable to play!

My final update is a call out to our long-term goals. First, we’re working towards an internal demo to get the game into the hands of a few close friends and start looking at balance and how fun the game is overall. From there we aim to have a public demo ready along with the Steam page to hit Steam Next Fest in February 2027.

Design Update

When we first started to explore what kind of game we’d like to make, its theme and direction, I jumped on it and all that excitement went straight into designing boxes and machines, bypassing all the logical steps needed to create scalable assets. However, I don’t regret diving head-first into asset making, as I learned a lot from those initial mistakes – mistakes that I would like to explore in our blog.

I decided to dial it back and create a plan for the next six months to lead us up to the demo. While creating the original assets, I had no real anchor, and we only loosely knew what needed to be on-screen for the game to function. This created a problem: the assets didn’t work together. It felt like everything was just stickers stuck to a wall – no intention, no consistency. Back to the drawing board!

The first task I gave myself was to create a blockout – basically a very, very ugly scene. This was a challenge for me as I tend to be a perfectionist and I’m very visual, so creating something that is deliberately not meant to be perfect or visually stunning hurt me a little inside.

But this is where I’ve started again this week: planning and mapping out an ugly scene. Once the blockout was done, it was on to refinement. The 2D blocks needed volume so we could understand how each machine, box, consumable and tracker would occupy the scene. This is where I will continue this week, on refinement.