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Where Volley! sits visually among its neighbours, and where the territory is still open.

A small farm at the bottom of the screen

Jordan Morris released Rusty's Retirement in April 2024: a pixel farming sim that lives as a narrow strip at the bottom of the player's desktop and progresses while they work. Morris built the prototype in two weeks after shipping his previous game, Haiku, the Robot, on the logic that idle games let him "make casual progress without requiring constant attention" during a period when the rest of his life had no room for it [1][4]. Rusty's sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week [3] and reached 550,000 by July 2025, built on the same thousand-euro PC Morris had used before the game [2]. He cites Gnorp Apologue as the direct inspiration, and describes the original pitch as fitting between the work he was doing and the life he was living [4].

This is an unusual kind of hit. Its technical footprint is modest. Its art style is the retro-pixel register almost every Steam idle defaults to. It is not visually ambitious, and it does not try to be. What made it land was the fit: the game takes the shape of the time the player has to give it. Against the dashboard maximalism that has defined the idle genre since Cookie Clicker, and against the mobile cozy lineage that has grown for a decade, Rusty's names something quieter. A game you work beside, not over.

Volley! is neither Rusty's Retirement nor a Cookie Clicker descendant. It shares Rusty's attitude (a game that sits with the player through a long day) but builds a different object: a hand-drawn pong rally as the idle loop, a bright surface that opens into harder material as the story goes, and a secondary desktop-companion mode that enters the ambient category only after the primary work is done. The question is whether the combination has a place in the current indie landscape, and what the game has to be to earn it.

The idle genre's visual conventions

The idle game, in its commercial form, began with Cookie Clicker in 2013 and has refused to become a visual object. Cookie Clicker, NGU Idle, Melvor Idle, Clicker Heroes, AdVenture Capitalist: interfaces with minimal decoration, where the game is the loop and the loop is the numbers. The player returns because the numbers are doing something; visual identity, where it exists, is comic-broad.

Minimalism is sometimes itself the argument. Frank Lantz, founding chair of the NYU Game Center and designer of Universal Paperclips, calls his own work "playable philosophy" [13][14]. Paperclips (2017) dramatises Nick Bostrom's thought experiment about an AI with a single arbitrary goal [14], using text and a growing pile of buttons to give the player, in Lantz's phrasing, "direct, first-hand experience of what it means to be fully compelled by an arbitrary goal" [13]. The absence of visual identity is part of the argument. The game is not decorated because decoration would soften the trap.

Other text-only idles run on the same premise. A Dark Room, Candy Box, Kittens Game, Antimatter Dimensions: games made compelling by writing and pacing alone, proving that the idle loop has a pull independent of visual investment. A player will accumulate wood in a text prompt for hours if the prompt is good enough.

Mobile cozy idles won at massive scale by making the opposite bet. Cats and Soup, Tsuki Adventure, and Neko Atsume take soft palettes, rounded shapes, and pastel nature themes to audiences in the tens of millions. The visual identity is gentle by design. The player returns because the game is pleasant to look at, and the loop runs underneath without asking to be foregrounded.

Between these poles, Steam idles mostly settled on retro pixel. Idle Slayer, Leaf Blower Revolution, and Rusty's Retirement use pixel art as a production-affordable way to give the game personality. A minimalist lineage runs alongside (Gnorp Apologue, SPACEPLAN, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole [21]), making confident restraint work as a third option. A diegetic tradition stretches from Godville's newspaper metaphor to Black Hole Fishing's interface-as-physical-magazine [22], where the interface is an object in the fiction rather than a layer on top of it.

Hand-drawn illustration at the visual centre of an idle game is unclaimed territory. Milky Way Idle, in Early Access since March 2025 [20], includes illustrated character portraits but is primarily menu-driven. The mobile cozy lineage uses illustration at mass scale with a soft-shape vocabulary that is its own register. No current idle release combines ambitious illustration with the register Volley! works in. Volley! is built for the inside of that gap.

Sport as a frame for emotion

Pong-likes exist as action games. Pong Quest (Atari, 2020) reimagined the format as a dungeon-crawling RPG. Bit Ball and a few others carry the two-paddle loop into arcade directions. Mobile sport idles (Idle Soccer Tycoon, Boxing Clicker, and their relatives) use generic icons with no real-time gameplay. An idle game with an animated sport at its visual centre has no clear precedent.

Despelote (Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena, published by Panic, May 2025) is a first-person vignette about a boy chasing a football through Quito during Ecuador's qualification for the 2002 FIFA World Cup [5]. Its visual language pairs hand-drawn black-and-white characters and props with LiDAR-scanned environments of real Quito streets [6]. Valbuena explained the combination in a behind-the-scenes interview: "We wanted to combine these characters that are more expressive with a setting that is more real and evokes what Ecuador was like in those years" [7]. Cordero, whose childhood the game loosely adapts, wanted the 3D space so the player could "capture the physical sensation of kicking a ball around in a 3D space" [7].

The effect is particular. A hand-drawn child moves through a real place. The ball has real weight. Emotional material arrives through ambient play: a kick against a wall, a lingering in a courtyard, the 2001 radio commentary carrying through the afternoon [26]. Despelote drew multiple IGF nominations and broad critical coverage [8]. It is the 2025 release that established sport as a frame for indie emotional material, and it did so by treating a single kick as enough.

Golf Club: Wasteland (Demagog Studio, 2021, renamed to Golf Club: Nostalgia in July 2023 after a legal claim) pairs a 2.5D golf course (2D characters and props against 3D environments) with an in-game radio station of human monologues [23]. The lead designer, Igor Simić, came to games from a background in editorial cartooning and has spoken about the studio's work as "interactive satire" [23]. It is the closest existing example of a game using a sport to hold reflective material. Windblown (Motion Twin, Early Access October 2024) is not a sport game but an action roguelite from the Dead Cells studio. Its characters and environments are fully 3D, rendered with cel-shading and art direction that reads as hand-drawn: expressive silhouettes, clear line, painted textures. It is a production benchmark for what expressive character animation achieves at full density, and a reminder that the hand-drawn look can live inside more than one pipeline.

Haikyuu!! (Production I.G., 2014–2020) is the canonical text on how volleyball can be an emotional language: the build-up before a spike, the contact, the team reaction, the stretched time at impact. Its animation vocabulary has shaped a generation of sports-anime pacing. Volley! draws on Haikyuu's animation language more directly than on any sport game, because no sport game has tried to carry that vocabulary into an interactive loop.

What Volley! adds to the tradition is not the emotional framing of sport (Despelote arrived first) but the combination of that framing with an idle structure. Most interactive sport narratives work within a match, a season, or a career. Despelote works within a single summer of wandering. Volley! asks what a single rally can carry when the rally is the long arc.

Hand-drawn illustration in 2025

Hand-drawn illustration is not a novel visual language, but its commercial and critical reception in 2025 has been unusually strong. Any project relying on hand-drawn work as its primary visual voice is making a production bet; recent peer validation lowers the risk.

Cuphead (Studio MDHR, 2017) is the reference that looms over all of this. Chad and Jared Moldenhauer began the project in 2010 as a side experiment while keeping their day jobs [17]. Animation was produced on paper, scanned, then digitally inked [17]. To finish, the brothers left their jobs and re-mortgaged their homes [16]. They have corrected the mortgage-and-quit story as it often gets told: "We did re-mortgage our homes and quit our jobs. But it was never as if we woke up one morning and it happened. There were baby steps" [16]. The E3 2015 reveal was the turning point; the game shipped in September 2017 and passed two million copies by December that year [15].

The cautionary weight of Cuphead on small teams is well known. Its productive weight is less often named: the demonstration that a small team can carry a unified hand-drawn visual voice across every asset (enemies, backgrounds, UI, bosses), and that a market will pay for the commitment. The usable lesson for Volley! is not the retro-pastiche framing, which was specific to its 1930s animation reference. It is the production discipline: nothing in the frame breaks the fiction, including the interface. The same hand draws everything.

Eight years on, the risk of the commitment is lower.

Wanderstop (Ivy Road, March 2025) is a 3D cozy tea-shop experience with a stylised, colourful art direction [9][11]. Ivy Road is the studio founded in 2021 by Davey Wreden, the composer C418, and Karla Zimonja (Gone Home, Tacoma) [9]. Wreden's earlier work is directly relevant to Volley!'s narrative register. The Stanley Parable (2013) built its entire mechanics around an unreliable narrator whose authority keeps slipping as the player catches on to the structure of the game [27]. The Beginner's Guide (2015) did a similar move at a quieter, more personal register. Wanderstop is the third step in that arc, translated into cozy framing. The willingness to let a game reveal its own scaffolding, to trust the player to handle a change in what they thought they were playing, sits at the core of the lineage Volley! works in. Art direction lead Temi Olujobi has cited Impressionism in the vegetation as "evocative of feeling," and Art Nouveau's "decadent and indulgent" natural forms for environmental intricacy [11]. Those themes inform the design; the visible result is a saturated, stylised 3D world doing work the narrative alone cannot.

The Eternal Life of Goldman (Weappy Studio, published by THQ Nordic) is a platformer adventure through a hand-drawn archipelago, "meticulously drawn, colored and animated by hand using classic frame-by-frame techniques" in the developer's own framing [28]. Its demo passed 1,000 Steam user reviews at 88% positive [28]. Bye Sweet Carole (Little Sewing Machine, 2025) is a Disney-animation-inspired dark fairytale in the same hand-drawn 2D register. Both point at the same signal: painterly hand-drawn 2D draws press and commercial attention when the visual ambition is visible in every frame.

Hand-drawn work is viable for a small team in 2025, provided the visual identity is committed and the production supports the work. The bar is completeness, not polish.

Scale is the risk

Every peer in this section carries a production warning. Cuphead stretched from 2010 to 2017 and cost the Moldenhauers their mortgages before it broke even [16]. The Eternal Life of Goldman describes its own production as "the most difficult path possible" [28]. Wanderstop took Ivy Road four years and a founding trio with C418 and Karla Zimonja on it. Frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation at game scale is one of the most expensive visual commitments an indie team can make. A solo project that aims at this register without a plan for the scale problem will fail in production, not in market.

Volley!'s approach is to design around the constraint rather than against it. The art bible leans on the Ranking of Kings and Eizouken lesson that simple shapes carry enormous range when they move with intention: fewer frames, better chosen, expression through body language. The prototype scope deliberately bounds the character-animation surface (a main character, a first partner, a handful of support roles), with cast growth planned for later phases once the visual pipeline has proven itself at prototype scale. The two registers (constructed and real) share character designs and shift through colour, edge, and composition rather than re-animation. The Cuphead warning is real. The design answers it with every lever it has.

Cozy surfaces that carry weight

Cozy games as a named market have existed for a decade, rooted in Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and the mobile lineage around Neko Atsume. Since 2020 the category has shifted: a growing number of releases carry emotional material through the cozy surface rather than settling for the surface alone. The market has followed. The online cozy-games market stood at $973 million in 2024, projected to reach $1.47 billion by 2032 at 6.5% CAGR [19]. Games tagged "cozy" on SteamDB rose from 146 in 2023 to 371 in 2024 [19]. Female gamers account for over 60% of the player base [19]. The category is broad, commercially serious, and growing.

Within that category, the 2025 conversation has been unusually explicit about depth. A GamesRadar year-end feature on Wanderstop runs under the direct title "Just making a cozy game isn't enough to heal a person" [10]. The piece discusses Wreden's own framing of Wanderstop as a response to his burnout from The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide [10][12]. Wreden's own description is candid. "This is me talking about my feeling of, not just not to burn out," he has said; "burnout is certainly the symptom. But what does it mean to have a relationship with yourself, that's like, 'I wish I was a different person other than who I am'" [10].

Wanderstop is the clearest 2025 peer for what Volley! attempts structurally. The tea-shop mechanics stay pleasant all the way through; brewing tea does not stop being satisfying as the game opens into its emotional material. Depth accumulates alongside warmth rather than replacing it. Critics have named the accumulation, not any single reveal, as why the game lands [10].

The genre's foundational text remains Omori (OMOCAT, 2020). The game received generally favourable coverage, with critics picking up the dual-world structure as the defining achievement: the palette shift between Headspace's bright pastel and reality's muted heaviness, the same character designs rendered at different levels of comfort, the slow reveal that recontextualises what the player has already seen. SuperJump Magazine reads Headspace as OMOCAT's comforting fantasy held in tension with the reality underneath, which is the move Volley! makes at a quieter pitch [18].

The criticism of Omori worth registering is about pacing. Some reviewers found the Headspace stretches tedious; the game's rhythm depended on believing the surface long enough for the reveal to matter, and not every player stayed with it [18]. The lesson for Volley! is the inverse: the cozy surface has to work on its own terms, not only as set-up. A player who never engages with the narrative layer should still find value in the rally, the items, the partners, the slow accumulation of the record.

Two more recent releases fill out this lineage. In Stars and Time (insertdisc5, November 2023, ongoing accolades into 2025) runs a hand-drawn storybook cast through a time-loop. The game opens charming and settles into a meditation on repetition and friendship. The Berlin Apartment (Inkas Games, November 2025) uses a renovation-and-relics framing to shift between a present-day apartment and historical vignettes across decades of Berlin life, delivering dual-timeline warmth through ordinary domestic tasks. Herdling (Okomotive, August 2025), from the studio behind FAR: Lone Sails, runs a pastoral journey guiding creatures up a mountain, with small narrative beats revealing heavier themes through environmental storytelling.

What these games share is a refusal to treat the bright surface as a lie to be dismantled. Learning the truth in Omori does not punish the player for enjoying Headspace. The grief in Wanderstop does not undercut the satisfaction of brewing tea. Volley! takes the same approach. The idle loop works without the narrative layer, and the narrative layer does not retract the warmth.

Art that responds to the story

Slay the Princess (Black Tabby Games, October 2023) is the clearest recent demonstration of hand-drawn art as an active storytelling instrument rather than a fixed visual register. The studio is a two-person husband-and-wife team, Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard; Howard is an Ignatz-winning graphic novelist whose pencil-on-paper drawings render every background and character in the game [29]. The narrator is voiced by Jonathan Sims of The Magnus Archives [30], and the game passed a million copies sold by early 2026 [29].

What makes it relevant here is how the art behaves under narrative pressure. The Princess the player is sent to kill takes different forms across different playthroughs depending on what the player believes about her; the narrator's authority degrades and recovers as the player pushes against him; backgrounds shift register as the loops progress. Howard's team has described the pencil style as chosen initially for speed over Scarlet Hollow's more elaborate work, then kept because it fit the "dreamy, ever-shifting aesthetic" the game needed [29]. The rough, hand-made quality of the line is doing storytelling work. Smooth rendering would flatten a game whose subject is the instability of what the player is seeing.

Slay the Princess shares The Stanley Parable's unreliable-narrator structure, but delivers it through art rather than script. The combination of drawn-by-hand specificity, shifting forms, and register responsive to player interpretation is a direct influence on how Volley! thinks about its own visual storytelling. The two registers Volley! works in (constructed and real) are a milder version of the same move: the art changes because the story has changed, and the change is the point.

Hand-made quality reads as honest in a way polished rendering does not, which matters for a game with a bright surface that needs to be trusted. Art that shifts with narrative is a structural device, not decoration. Visual ambition at indie scale comes down to matching technique to scope early: pencil and paper for Slay the Princess; simple shapes that carry expression through motion for Volley!.

Desktop companion games

Volley!'s primary experience is fullscreen. Its secondary desktop-companion mode sits in a small window alongside the player's work, with its own conventions.

Rusty's Retirement is the category's defining release [1][2][3]. Its success validated the desktop-resident idle as a commercial proposition; the 550,000-copy figure is the load-bearing number. Desktopia places tiny low-poly villagers directly on the desktop. Desktop Meadow uses pixel art with a watercolour-evocative palette for birds and butterflies, closer in register to Volley!'s secondary mode than the louder companion apps. Desktop Mate (infiniteloop, 2024–25) lets licensed anime characters roam across the user's screen and has become the highest-visibility companion release since Rusty's [24]. Tiny Pasture (2024), Desktop Friend (2025), and frameworks like Pal Engine and Desktop Companion (2025) offer Steam Workshop-powered platforms for user-authored desktop pets [25]. The classic lineage (Desktop Goose, Shimeji, Tabagotchi) established two principles: personality in a desktop game comes through animation behaviour rather than art fidelity, and a small visual footprint is a virtue.

Volley!'s secondary mode sits in this category with a specific constraint. Most desktop companions are ambient decoration; Volley!'s secondary mode is a scaled-down version of a larger primary game. The art direction has to survive the scale shift, which means the hand-drawn voice has to remain readable at small sizes. This links back to the primary mode's visual discipline: silhouettes that hold, line quality that retains character, colour that reads at any size. The Six Marks named in the art bible, Intentional, Specific, Distinct, Diegetic, Breathing, Shifting, are load-bearing here. A character that does not read at the scale of a desktop window is not yet Volley!.

Volley!'s position

Each current Volley! combines has a recent exemplar. Despelote for sport as an emotional frame [5][7]. Wanderstop for the bright-to-honest register shift [9][10][11]. Slay the Princess for hand-drawn art that responds to narrative [29][30]. Rusty's Retirement for desktop-resident idle as a commercial format [1][2][3]. The exemplars exist. The scarcity is in combining them.

That scarcity is structural. Each thread carries its own production discipline, its own design conviction, and its own demand on player trust. Holding four disciplines in one release is harder than delivering any one of them, and the difficulty is what keeps the intersection open. A hand-drawn idle with sport at its centre, bright-to-honest weight underneath, and art that shifts with the narrative is the specific thing the 2025 landscape has not built.

For the secondary desktop-companion mode, Rusty's Retirement is the format peer and Desktop Meadow the spirit peer. The primary experience is where the position's weight sits.

What the position commits to

A favourable market does not guarantee reception. The positioning makes the production bet legible to press, publishers, grant readers, and players who already know what the peer work feels like.

The commitments come down to one thing: trust something that does not yet feel safe to trust. Cuphead trusted that a small team could carry frame animation through a full game. Omori trusted that players would stay with Headspace long enough for the reveal to matter. Despelote trusted that a kick against a wall could hold a story. Slay the Princess trusted that the art could change and the player would follow. Volley! is the sum of those trusts: in the hand-drawn voice, in the rally as the centrepiece of an idle loop, in the two registers, in the player who comes back across a long day.

In Despelote, the player spends most of the game in a few city blocks of Quito, kicking a ball back against walls, listening to an afternoon that will not be hurried, waiting for Ecuador to qualify. Nothing in the game is mechanically complex. The weight is in the restraint: a kick, a wall, a radio carrying through the heat, and the decision to let those be enough. Volley! has room to be specific in the same way: a rally that runs alongside the working day, and a count that, by the time it arrives, is no longer only a count.

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