About
A bench in a spare room in Fernwood.
feldspire started in March 2026, on a desk that used to hold a table saw and now holds two phones and a tin of jeweller's screwdrivers.
I am Colin Mahaffy. For nine years I wrote invoicing and reconciliation software for a company in Saanich, the kind of product that thousands of people open every morning and nobody can name a single author of. That is not a sad story, it is just how software works. The credits, if there are any, live in a text file nobody opens.
Games are different. Games still roll credits. And on a phone, that roll is sometimes so short you can photograph the whole thing.
How the question found me
Early in 2026 I installed a small puzzle game on the ferry to Tsawwassen, got irritated by a menu that clearly nobody had tested, and went looking for who to blame. The answer was one man in another country who had built the entire thing in the evenings. The irritation turned into something else immediately. The menu was not sloppiness. It was a person deciding that this was the part they could live with.
That reframe is the whole site. Knowing the crew size changes what a flaw means. It does not make the flaw disappear.
What the bench does
One question per game: how many people built it, and what proves that number. We call the answer Hands. Every build on the site shows the count and names the evidence beside it, so you can disagree with the reasoning rather than trust the conclusion.
The full procedure, including where it fails, is on the method page.
What the bench does not do
- Scores. No numbers out of ten. Hands is a headcount, and reading it as a quality rating is a mistake.
- Guesses. If two sources disagree or the trail runs out, the card says not confirmed and stays that way. There is one of those on the site right now, and it is staying until somebody publishes a start date.
- Reader mail. I have seen sites like this print letters from readers in three different cities. This one has an inbox of about eleven messages, most of them from a friend in Nanaimo, and none of them are going on the front page pretending to be a mailbag.
- Track records. No "137 games tested" counter. The site is four months old and has one issue out. Inventing a back catalogue would be the exact dishonesty the metric is supposed to argue against.
- Gambling. Anything carrying a simulated gambling advisory stays off, including one excellent solo-made game that I would otherwise have led with.
The bench itself
Testing happens on a Pixel 7a bought used in 2024, and a 2021 iPad for the paid iOS builds. Store data gets pulled from the Canadian storefronts, because a price in another currency is a different fact about a different market. Everything gets a date attached, because store listings change underneath you: one price on this site moved by six dollars between platforms on the same afternoon, and that is now printed as a discrepancy rather than tidied into an average.
The honest caveat
I do not finish these games. I put fifteen to forty minutes into each one, enough to see how it is built and where it strains, then I go and read about who made it. If you want to know whether the late-game difficulty curve holds up, I genuinely cannot tell you. There are people who do that well, and I am not one of them.