Suwithcha "Pondd" Sugthana is a solo iOS developer based in Bangkok. Stack Fighters is his eighth shipped game, built in evenings and weekends alongside a full-time product job. The game is a 1v1 battle-puzzle fighter where players stack colored blocks, chain combos, and unleash ultimate abilities across six warriors drawn from different cultures: Thai, Japanese, Norse, Aztec, Knight, and Nomad. Each character has a distinct visual identity, fighting style, signature ultimate move, and their own voice.
Art Direction for Six Cultures, Solo
Building the mechanics was the manageable part. Building six visually distinct, fully voiced characters (each needing their own silhouette, color language, cultural authenticity, and audio personality) was a different problem entirely. It's the kind of production challenge that can stall a solo project for months. For Pondd, it took about two weekends.
Where the MCP Changed Everything
Stack Fighters launched with a design constraint that would intimidate most teams: six playable characters, each from a different cultural tradition, each needing to feel authentic rather than stereotyped. That's a lot of visual decisions for one person to make without a creative director, an art team, or a reference library built specifically for game characters.
The Same Pipeline, Applied to Audio
Pondd's answer was to build a workflow. He started with Claude, using it to generate detailed character briefs, visual prompt language, personality traits, and ultimate move concepts for each fighter. The process was iterative: describe a character, push back on the output, refine until the brief felt right. Those refined prompts then went into Ludo for visual reference generation.
Staying in Control
"Because Claude's prompts were already game-literate and specific, Ludo's outputs were sharper than what I got from vague free-form prompting. I'd pick the direction that felt right."
Where to Find Stack Fighters
The first character through the pipeline was Phraya, the Thai Muay Thai fighter. Pondd ran the full loop manually: Claude for design and concept, Ludo for visual execution, then wiring the character into the game and playtesting on his phone. When Phraya felt right in actual combat, that loop became the template for everything that followed.
The real unlock came when Pondd connected Ludo directly to his development environment via the Ludo MCP. Instead of manually exporting assets from Ludo and importing them into his project, the pipeline collapsed into a single flow. He would ask Claude to run the same character design process for the remaining five fighters, and Ludo would push the generated art assets directly into his project folder.
"Yes, Claude and Ludo can talk directly — art assets would just appear in my project. Magic."
For a developer working evenings and weekends around a day job, that kind of async automation isn't a convenience. It's what makes the project viable.
"I do a vertical slice for one character and I just ask Claude to do the same for all other 5 chars — since Ludo can keep art theme the same, it can automate all the assets for the rest."
The two-phase approach was deliberate. Run the prompts through Ludo manually on the first character to get the visual language right, then switch to the Claude-to-Ludo MCP for the rest. The vertical slice on Phraya established the theme; the MCP replicated it faithfully across Akiko, Ragnar, Citlali, Alaric, and Zoya.
Visual assets were not the only production layer where the workflow paid off. Stack Fighters ships with six fully voiced characters, each with combat dialogue and personality-driven lines tied to their story cutscenes. It also has a full suite of sound effects and an original score. For a solo developer, that's a significant audio production scope.
