Doodlekins

Doodlekins is Xesenix's hand-drawn Unity idle RPG: assemble doodle creatures from parts, send them against endless waves, and harvest souls and gems for upgrades. It lived in beta, versions 0.4.9 through 0.5.3 around 2015, with buildings arriving in 0.5.2, and its canonical home is Game Jolt.

What the loop feels like

You assemble a doodle, it fights a wave, and the souls fund a better doodle. The parts are the charm: creatures snap together from hand-drawn pieces, so every recruit looks like a margin sketch that learned to fight. That's Doodlekins.

Creatures unlock, quests grant abilities, buildings arrive with the 0.5.2 era of the beta, and the hand-drawn menagerie grows into an army of scribbles with real stats. That's Doodlekins.

The systems doing the work

What can be verified from its beta-era record: creature assembly from drawn parts, wave-based combat as the income engine, souls and gems as the dual upgrade currencies, quest-granted abilities, and the buildings layer that landed in 0.5.2. It was an idle RPG in the classic browser sense, an army that fights on your behalf while you direct the upgrades, and the Almost Idle screenshots document its look better than any store page ever did. The assembly system is the part worth remembering: instead of fixed creature designs, you compose fighters from hand-drawn components, which made every roster personal in a way the genre's stat-block armies never manage. There is no documented endgame, which is honest for a beta: the development log simply stops.

Where it stumbles

It is a beta that stopped, and everything that implies: version numbers as its milestone history, no finale, no balance pass, no confirmed modern-browser playability despite the Unity WebGL embed surviving on its pages, and a development trail that goes cold around 2015. Its obscurity is real too: three source pages and a teaser video are the entire footprint, with no community discussion to reconstruct what the later builds changed. What stumbles is not the design, which had legs, but the timeline that abandoned it.

Playing it today

The Game Jolt page is live and is the canonical home, with the Kongregate listing surviving as metadata. Treat the WebGL embed as a maybe, not a promise. For living takes on the idle-RPG wave it belonged to, Progress Quest is the founding ancestor and Tap Tap Adventure carries the party-grind torch.

The verdict

A hand-drawn idle RPG beta with real charm: the doodle art style carries it, the creature-assembly loop had legs, and the drawings deserved a finished game. They did not get one, but the sketches and screenshots that remain are worth the visit, and the beta builds still tell you exactly what the finished thing would have been.