A generational life-simulation MMO. The world keeps moving whether you're online or not. When your character dies, your soul returns to a new life — same world, with the consequences of the last one still in it: in your descendants' reputation, in the institutions you helped build, in the rumors that outlived you.
This is the dev journey: long-form posts about the engineering, the architecture, and the slow accretion of a sandbox a solo developer is building in the open. The voice is closer to a Factorio Friday Facts entry than a marketing trailer — the work, with the receipts. More about the game itself.
— One morning in April, an agent I'd sent to audit my own governance came back certain that four rule files were broken and a CI gate was failing. None of it was true — the gate passed twenty-seven of twenty-seven. The only thing that caught it was me happening to look. This is how I stopped relying on that, and built fences that make a careless collaborator's mistakes cheap and loud instead of expensive and silent.
— The build guide behind the fences: a Claude Code setup that hands real write access to coding agents and survives it. The PreToolUse deny-by-JSON contract, a launcher that binds role to model and makes 'done' a file on disk, a boundary hook that confines each writer to its component, and a dispatch-discipline hook that won't let a fact-finder run until it has named — on disk, up front — how its finding will be proven. Trimmed-but-real bash you can port to any harness with a pre-execution hook.
— An AI-generated pixel-art pipeline with no AI judging the AI. The recipe is the type object, I'm the gate, and the manifest is deterministic on the way out — even though the generation in the middle isn't. Here's the stack, the saga, and the war stories.
— A reproducible local Stable Diffusion stack and the PixelLab integration that turns concept images into sprites, end to end: ComfyUI on Ubuntu with FaceDetailer + 4× upscale, the production model set Skaldborn ships against, the launch flags that keep VAE decode from OOM-ing on a 4 GB card, and a complete Python flow for hitting PixelLab's v2 API.
— In February and March we sank roughly 240 hours into a system that worked. In late April we deleted it. This is the test that triggered the deletion, the books on the shelf that told us we were going to fail it, and the architecture we rebuilt in its place.
— In February of this year I asked my wife to sit down with one of the NPCs in Skaldborn. In late April I deleted the system that produced that moment, along with about two months of working code, and started over. This is the story of how that happened, and why I'd do it the same way again.
— Most games build narrative first and fit simulation around it. Skaldborn flips that — the AI is downstream of the truth, by construction. Here's the rule, the receipts, and the boring engineering it took to make the rule mechanically true.
What's here
What Skaldborn is — the design pillars, the unusual ones especially.
Skaldtorium — interactive demos of the audio system: layered music, surface-tagged foley, ambient beds.
Who's making it — solo dev, Norse-flavored simulation, in development.
RSS — for the feed-reader holdouts (this one included).