Paper Blades

Overview

You command a squad of origami samurai with your voice. Paper Blades is a roguelike strategy game in a stylised feudal Japan, built by a six-person Placeholders Studio team, and it became the studio’s turning point: second place at the 16th ZTGK, plus the Digital Dragons, Game Access and GameDev Lawyer awards. I worked on the game’s voice-control side and built much of the shared systems layer it ran on.

Technical Highlights

• Voice-commanded units. Spoken commands are recognised and mapped to orders that drive the samurai, which behave as GOAP-based ally agents pursuing goals rather than following scripted steps, so the squad reacts to instructions in the middle of a fight.
• Readable voice feedback. An on-screen visualiser shows what the game heard, so players can trust that a command actually registered before committing to it.
• Decoupled event bus. Much of the game runs on a ScriptableObject event bus that lets systems talk without direct references, with a dispatch loop that safely handles listeners removing themselves mid-event.
• Reusable studio systems. The audio manager, with DOTween-driven music crossfades and positional sound, and a multi-profile save and load layer were built to be reused, and later became part of the template the studio carried into new projects.

Learnings

Beyond the awards, Paper Blades proved we could take an unusual concept, voice control of a strategy game, and build it into something polished enough to show to the industry. It also taught me the value of building systems as reusable foundations rather than one-off game code.