When I came back to Squarelets after a classic case of developer burnout and an extended break, working solo again just as at the start, I wanted the first big update to have a creative purpose bigger than numbers on a screen.
That turned out to be a two-week event with a blood cancer charity.
What the event was
From 28 May to 11 June 2026, Squarelets ran The Adventures of Little Red Blood Cell, created in partnership with DKMS UK. It is a twist on the classic Little Red Riding Hood where you play special puzzle levels, and completing them unlocks the next part of an illustrated story.
We started it on 28 May because that is World Blood Cancer Day, the anniversary of the day DKMS was founded.
Little Red sets out from her home with a basket brimming with glowing bubbles of fresh air, travels the Crimson River and the Bone Forest to see Grandma Marrow. Somewhere along the way she meets the Wolf of Weariness.
Where it all began
Little Red Blood Cell is older than the game she lives in.
She was drawn for our first DKMS event, which ran in May 2024, back when Squarelets was an iOS-only game. Since then Squarelets has been rebuilt from the ground up in Unity, and she came across with it. The 2026 event is the second one we have done together, and it is running on an engine that did not exist in her life the first time round.
DKMS had first met Squarelets at Develop:Brighton in the summer of 2023 and liked the game’s universe. I have always wanted to make games that do good in the world, so there was a natural connection.
Squarelets itself goes back further still. The first prototype was a quiet tapping puzzle I made in 2015, stuck in a hospital in Germany just to have something to take my mind off reality. It stayed a side project for a long time. Then it turned into the studio.
We couldn’t make the event in 2025 as we were in the middle of moving Squarelets to Unity and it simply was not feasible. That is the part of a rewrite nobody puts in the estimate: not the engineering, but the year of things you would otherwise have done.
The first event we ran was also when weekly challenges were added to Squarelets - this was the most natural format for it. It has since grown and evolved along with the game. As there is more of a story to Squarelets and the characters in the game (which I think everyone calls Squarelets too, so this became their official name by now!), another step was to show some of the story as part of the challenge.
Why Little Red Riding Hood
The idea itself arrived the way most of mine do, which is to say, when I was not looking for it. The hardest way for me to come up with something is to sit down and try to do it, but when I am just going about my day, suddenly it is there. And if it is good, I can just feel it. Things just click. The concrete reasons why usually come afterwards, once I think about it more but it starts with a feeling.
I don’t know how to explain that better. I sometimes wonder if that’s how most people go about creating things or whether they have more structured approaches. I guess it’s probably a mix.
Going back to Little Red: she was a good fit as our DKMS mascot because she is small and she is red and she goes to visit her grandma. That is a red blood cell’s entire job description. She carries a basket of food and supplies, just like a red blood cell carries oxygen. Her grandmother lives at the end of the journey, and in the body that grandmother is the bone marrow, which is where blood is made in the first place.
And the grandmother is being eaten by a wolf. I do not think there is a better analogy for blood cancer than something consuming a person from the inside, starting with the place that makes them.
We might not think about it too much these days, but this fairytale is actually pretty frightening. Little Red is in danger the whole way and arrives to find her grandma eaten by a wolf only to share her fate. This is what being ill is like.
Because both of the stories fitted so well together, it made creating the artworks for the event much easier and enjoyable. Following the adventures of Little Red Blood Cell led me to realise I almost forgot about the most important part of the story.
The part I forgot
I was writing all this down and got most of the way through before remembering that Little Red Riding Hood didn’t save her grandma on her own - the story has a hunter in it.
He turns up near the end. He is not family, he has no particular reason to be there, and he deals with the wolf and the grandmother lives.
That is exactly what a stem cell donor is: a stranger with no reason to be there, who turns up and is a match, and somebody’s grandmother lives. This realisation came much later in the process but only strengthened the reason for choosing it in the first place. It’s interesting how our brains work sometimes.
The money part
Alongside the story there was a DKMS Charity Bundle in the shop at £2.99, a one-off purchase, available only during the two weeks of the event. It held five hero skins based on real DKMS merchandise (a sweatband, a T-shirt, a bucket hat), plus a superhero cape and a cotton swab, because a painless mouth swab is all that joining the register involves. I committed 50% of developer net proceeds from every bundle to DKMS UK.
The event levels themselves were free to play. Nothing about the story was behind the purchase.
If you want to be the hunter
The event has finished - the thing it was pointing at has not.
“Everyone who joins the stem cell donor register is joining a worldwide chain of hope for people with blood cancers or disorders who need a stem cell transplant. So we are very grateful to Beatka and Chaos Cookie for shining a light on the process, and helping raise funds for our work.”
Caroline Richardson, Head of Fundraising, DKMS UK
If you are in the UK, aged between 16 and 55, and have been a UK resident at a permanent address for at least two years, you can request a swab kit from DKMS UK. It arrives in the post, you rub it on the inside of your cheek, and you send it back.
If you are reading this from Poland, Fundacja DKMS is the same organisation and runs the Polish register.
Elsewhere
Other people wrote about it:
- Pocket Gamer, Squarelets returns with DKMS UK charity event to raise cancer awareness (2026), and Squarelets to host charity event supporting blood cancer awareness charity DKMS (2024, on the first one)
- London Games Festival, who I know through their Game Changer programme
- DKMS UK, who gave Squarelets a page of its own and posted about the event
