Software Factory

01 / why

Why this exists

I used to play a lot of games. And pretty much every game I loved came with a list of remarks in the back of my head: the story should have gone somewhere else, a mechanic almost worked, the world looked huge but you couldn't really do anything in it (you know the feeling).

During the day I'm founder & CTO, building a financial platform. We use agents there too, but with a lot of guardrails (for good reasons). So I wanted a playground with way more degrees of freedom: what happens if you let a bunch of agents run wild on something where a bug just means a weird-looking creature?

Turns out, quite a lot. This is a side experiment. I put in 1-2 hours a week, the agents do the rest. I call the setup the software factory.

Why games? Cause it's fun, honestly. And because a game touches pretty much everything: art, music, story, systems, balancing, tests, you name it. That makes it a good stress test for how far multi-agent development actually goes.

So I'm going to keep doing it. Original games in the genres I grew up with, built the way I always wished they were. Free to play, in the browser.

02 / the factory

How it works (roughly)

It's basically a bunch of agents with jobs, and me deciding what gets built.

1. plan one orchestrator session holds the plan and splits the work up;
2. build worker agents (Claude, Codex, Gemini) build the pieces, often several at once;
3. review fresh reviewer agents check the work, preferably from a different vendor than the one that wrote it;
4. test the test suite decides if something lands (a few thousand tests atm);
5. art image models draft the creatures, and a lot of drafts get thrown out for looking too much like something that already exists;
6. ship I play the result, steer the story and the feel, and pick what's next.

Does it still need me? Yes. Do I write the code? Barely. Does it burn a ridiculous amount of tokens? Very very much yes.

My hour or two goes into direction and taste. The agents run for hours on their own, then I play what they made and adjust. It feels a bit like directing a very fast (and very literal) game studio.

03 / game #1

Aenimon

Aenimon is a creature-collecting RPG. You explore a region, run into Aenimon (singular = plural), earn their trust and grow with them. How you raise them decides what they turn into.

It runs in the browser on desktop and phone. Free, no account, no tracking.

A few things I did differently from what I remember of the genre:

• catching is about trust. Every miss makes the next try a bit more likely, and the game hints at how it's going;
• evolution depends on how you raise them: where you walk, how you take care of them, who leads the team;
• one story runs through everything, from the first town to the legends.

It's early. Chapter one is playable and I'll keep adding stuff.

Play Aenimon ↗

04 / saving

Saving (please read this one)

Your save lives in your browser. Handy, but browsers forget stuff (cleared data, a new phone, private mode). So back it up once in a while. Save in-game first, then open Options:

• Share Save sends the save file wherever you like: your notes, a chat with yourself, your mail;
• Save Link turns your whole save into a link (and a QR code for early saves). Open it on any device and you're back where you were;
• Import Save loads a save file. The save that's on the device gets backed up first.

Already have a save file? Open the game, pick Options on the title screen and choose Import Save.

The save link keeps your save after the # in the URL, so it never hits a server. It does mean anyone with the link can load a copy, so maybe don't post it publicly.

05 / build log

Updates