Cooking arcade01
Pasta Panic
Six burners. Forty seconds. One very impatient dining room.
A frantic one-thumb kitchen arcade about the exact moment everything boils over at once.
- Installs
- 620K
- Rating
- 4.6
- Released
- March 2024
Web studio · Android since 2021
Small games,
made with
unreasonable care.
NONNA is a six-person studio in Turin and Lisbon. We design, build and then actually maintain games and utilities for Google Play — four titles, two apps, and not a single one abandoned after launch.
4.60
average across 6 titles
- 6
- titles live on Google Play
- 2.17M
- lifetime installs
- 4.60
- average store rating
- 39
- months of unbroken updates
Unity 6Godot 4KotlinJetpack ComposePlay BillingStaged rolloutsOffline-firstASOLive-opsDevice-farm QA
The shelf
Four games, all still getting updates.
Each one lives in the Play Store today. Open a title to read how it was built, what it runs on, and who made it.
Cooking arcade
Hand-drawn puzzle02
Moth & Lantern
A quiet puzzle about following the only light left in the greenhouse.
Every frame painted by hand, every puzzle solved by moving a single source of light.
- Installs
- 184K
- Rating
- 4.8
- Released
- November 2024
Cozy idle03
Compost Club
A balcony allotment that keeps growing while your phone is in your pocket.
Our longest-running title: three years of updates, still growing month over month.
- Installs
- 940K
- Rating
- 4.7
- Released
- June 2023
Low-poly racer04
Zinc Rally
Boxy cars, dusty hairpins, and a handbrake that rewards nerve.
A deliberately analogue arcade racer — flat-shaded hills, one drift button, ghost replays.
- Installs
- 312K
- Rating
- 4.4
- Released
- August 2025
Off the clock
Two small utilities we built for ourselves.
Both shipped because someone in the studio needed them. They stay free, offline and unmonetised.
What we take on
Client work, run the same way as our own.
We take a small number of projects a year so the studio never turns into a queue. Work with us and you get the people whose names are on our own store listings.
01
Game development
From a napkin mechanic to a signed release build. Unity or Godot, portrait-first, tuned to run on the cheap handsets most of your players actually own.
- Prototype sprints
- Unity 6 / Godot 4
- Device-farm QA
02
Android apps
Native Kotlin utilities that work offline, respect the battery, and ask for the smallest permission set that gets the job done.
- Kotlin / Compose
- Local-first data
- Play Billing
03
Store releases & ASO
Listing copy, screenshot sets, staged rollouts, policy review, and the unglamorous paperwork that keeps a title from being pulled at 2am.
- Staged rollout
- Policy review
- Listing experiments
04
Live-ops & keeping it alive
Content calendars, crash triage, telemetry you can actually read, and SDK upgrades before Google makes them mandatory.
- Crash triage
- Season calendars
- Target-SDK upkeep
The recipe
Four steps, in this order, every time.
It is not a methodology with a trademark. It is the order that stops us building the wrong thing beautifully.
- Step One1 week
Taste first
We build the core loop before anything else — no art, no menus, no store page. If it is not fun as a grey box, more polish will not save it.
- Step Two2–3 weeks
Set the table
Art direction, one vertical slice, and a real device test on a four-year-old phone. You get an APK you can hand to someone at a bus stop.
- Step Three8–16 weeks
Cook it through
Production in two-week increments with a playable build at the end of each. Nothing is demoed from a laptop that cannot be installed.
- Step FourOngoing
Keep feeding it
Staged rollout, then the part most studios skip: reading reviews, fixing what the numbers show, and shipping content on a calendar.
The studio
Named after someone who never shipped an app.
NONNA started in 2021 in a converted flat above a bakery in Turin, with two people, one contract, and a rule taken from Ilaria’s grandmother: you do not serve something you would not eat yourself.
In practice that means we ship fewer things and keep them alive longer. Our oldest title has had 39 consecutive months of updates. We answer store reviews in the languages we speak. Nothing gets abandoned once the launch spike is over.
We are six people now, across Turin and Lisbon, and we intend to stay roughly this size.
“They shipped our Android build three weeks after the pitch and then stayed on for a year of updates. That second part is the rare bit.”
Who you work with
Ilaria Bencivenni
Studio lead, gameplay code
Teo Marchetti
Art direction, illustration
Kwame Aldridge
Engine, backend, telemetry
Sabine Rouault
Interface & environment art
Wren Okonkwo
Audio & music
Mira Halvorsen
Production, store & policy
No account managers, no offshore hand-off. The person who answers your email is the person writing the code.
Get in touch
Tell us what you want in the store.
Send the idea, however rough. We reply to everything within two working days, and we will tell you plainly if we are the wrong studio for it.
Direct
hello@nonna.studioCurrently
Booking client projects starting in the next quarter. Two slots open.