Build / Games / Software
Games and software I designed, engineered, and shipped solo, augmented by an AI-native development pipeline. An open-world game on Unreal Engine 5.7, a live multiplayer game with real players, and a commercial product on the market. Built, not described.
What I've shipped + what's in the engine
6,561 km²
Meta Machina world
81 × 81 km contiguous · UE5.7 World Partition
LIVE
Rift Wars · rift.metamachina.io
server-authoritative multiplayer, real players
13
Working days · Rift Wars build-to-live
solo + AI-augmented velocity
4,276
Card identities · 16 clans
full content library · 309 released
VFX Forge
Commercial product · shipped
browser VFX studio · sold on Gumroad
Class 9
Trademark · Meta Machina
franchise-scale IP · core assets registered
300+
Universe-bible pages
canonical context across every AI agent
23 yrs
Designing since 2003
player → modder → designer (lifelong player, professional design since 2003)
Flagship · in active development
Unreal Engine 5.7 · vertical slice
▸ Meta Machina · open-world science-cyberpunk survival
solo · AI-augmented pipeline
The studio flagship: a single-developer, AI-augmented open-world survival game targeting an investor-ready vertical slice ahead of team scale-up. Built on Unreal Engine 5.7 World Partition, a seamless streaming open world with no level seams and no fast travel by design. Nanite + Lumen under a custom cel-shaded look (Stylized Rendering System): Borderlands-grade toon shading over Cyberpunk-grade atmosphere.
The defensible engineering isn't the map size — in World Partition, generating an 81-km landscape from a heightmap is one of the easy steps. The hard part is the AI-augmented build pipeline driving the work (MCP-driven engine control via runreal + Ultimate Blueprint Generator for automated Blueprint authoring under a warn-before-modify ruleset), the integration discipline wiring production frameworks into a coherent vertical slice, and the fact that Rift Wars — the live multiplayer game already in production — proves the studio ships. World spec for scope: an 81 km × 81 km contiguous landscape (6,561 km²), 8×8 World Partition grid of 64 streaming regions, 32,513² heightmap at 2.5 m vertex spacing across dunes, canyons, black mountains, volcanic rifts, snow, salt flats, with the radial Invictus megacity embedded — supporting spec, not the headline.
Gameplay runs on production-grade frameworks integrated and modified rather than written from scratch, the right call for a solo dev hitting a vertical slice: GMCv2 networked movement, ALS locomotion, SKG tactical gunplay, RTune v2 Chaos-physics vehicles with full network prediction, Brushify terrain materials.
At a glance
▸ Signature design systems
★ AI-augmented pipeline
MCP-driven engine control via runreal, operating through UE5's Python Remote Execution layer to drive editor operations programmatically. Ultimate Blueprint Generator (Claude Desktop MCP) for automated Blueprint authoring under a disciplined warn-before-modify ruleset. AI content pipeline, Kling, MidJourney, RunwayML, ElevenLabs, feeding cinematics and assets. Modern tooling fluency beyond standard Unreal work.
▸ Build environment
A workstation-class rig built for world-scale work: AMD Threadripper PRO 3975WX (32c/64t), NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB), 256 GB RAM. Project on a Gen4 NVMe Dev Drive (~7,300 MB/s); Derived Data Cache isolated on a separate drive to kill I/O contention during cooks. Not a hobbyist setup, production hardware for a production world.
Multiplayer rollout, phased and cost-aware: single-player + co-op via Listen Server → regional instances on PlayFab / GameLift → full dedicated infrastructure. Target ambient density ~20–30 players per instance, Death Stranding / Souls-style passive encounters.
The proof it ships · live
rift.metamachina.io · Mar 2026 → present
Before the open world ships, the studio proves it can ship. Rift Wars is a production, server-authoritative multiplayer game running live at rift.metamachina.io, real players, real matches, built solo in ~13 working days. React + TypeScript client, Node.js + WebSocket backend with isomorphic shared types, PostgreSQL 16 + Redis 7. 6-tier minimax bot AI with beam pruning and hand-reading, exported verbatim into a sim harness that has processed millions of balance matches. A 9-market LMSR prediction layer per match, ranked ELO, tournaments, clans, and a two-track tutorial, full ownership of every system.
Self-hosted behind Cloudflare Tunnel with PM2 crash-recovery and automated backups, the same infrastructure discipline detailed on /systems. The 4,276 card identities and 16 clan visual languages are art-directed on /visual.
Engine · server-authoritative
real-time MP
The server is the sole authority for animations, not just state, clients render timing/VFX from a per-turn event array. Spectators see the exact same sequence; replays are deterministic by construction.
Bot AI
game AI
6 difficulty tiers; the top tier runs depth-3 minimax with an LMSR-derived position heuristic. The production AI is exported and run verbatim in the sim harness, no drift between what's tested and what ships.
Prediction markets
market design
Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule markets, match winner, first blood, center control, and more, trading live during play, settling atomically on match end. Spectators trade in real time.
Deploy discipline
prod ops
Production deploys at sustained 99%+ uptime with daily backups, health-check pipelines, and an active-match draining protocol that lets in-flight games finish before cutover.
Commercial product · shipped
Meta Machina LLC · on Gumroad
A real commercial product, not a demo. Design animated particle effects, energy bursts, and UI motion, then export production-ready CSS, React JSX, SVG, WebM, or GIF. 20 effect presets, 27 motion presets, a keyframe timeline, blend modes, live performance grading, running entirely client-side, no server or install. Built out of the Rift Wars effects work, packaged and sold under Meta Machina LLC.
See it on Gumroad →The credibility floor · lifelong player, designing since 2003
player · modder · designer
A lifelong player who turned it into work: freelance design on one of the early F2P MMOs back in 2003, clan leadership across thirty-plus titles, modding credits on the most-modded games of the past two decades, and a Magic: the Gathering Alpha / Black Lotus history. The floor under every Meta Machina and Rift Wars decision.
Freelance game design · 2003
Freelance gameplay design and storyboarding for TQ Digital: in-game items, early progression systems, weekly Guild Wars events. Among the first F2P MMOs with microtransactions, predating the WoW subscription generation.
Clan / guild leadership · 30+ MMOs
RuneScape, Path of Exile I & II, WoW, Guild Wars 1 & 2, Diablo 2 & 3, New World, Black Desert, PlanetSide 2, ArcheAge, AION, RIFT and more. Pattern: clans excelled through team leadership + finding the design weakpoints that opened optimal growth routes.
Modding · alpha test · exploit reporting
World modding for Sims 2. Skyrim, Fallout 3 + New Vegas modder. StarCraft 2 community campaign creator. White-hat exploit reporting across hundreds of online games to help maintain launch-phase integrity. Alpha tester across multiple titles.
TCG background
Magic: The Gathering early Alpha player. Former Black Lotus owner. The psychology of card-game design absorbed at the source, informs every mechanical decision in Rift Wars.
3D · tools fluency
Unreal Engine 5 (Systems Design + Blueprint Logic). Maya, 3DS Max, ZBrush. Multiple particle simulators. Procedural generation systems. Early ray-tracing user in 3DS Max in the early 2000s, before mainstream.
Render infrastructure · 2003 onward
Built and operated personal V-Ray render farms during the teen + 3D-animation years, foundational 3D production at scale before GPU compute became a consumer trope.
Game design pillars · Meta Machina / Rift Wars
The design philosophy underwriting the IP. Most game-design portfolios show screenshots; this is the framework the screenshots came out of.
01
ANTI-META PROGRESSION
Progression systems that resist optimization culture. Reward creative expression and personal playstyle. Infinite viable character combinations.
02
ANONYMITY CODEX
Eliminating traditional MMO UI clutter for authentic social dynamics. Visual-only player recognition over UI-based identity.
03
REALITY-INTEGRATED SYSTEMS
Every element serves narrative purpose. Meta Crystal energy economics. Faction territory reflecting resource scarcity, not arbitrary balance.
04
COMMUNITY-DRIVEN CULTURE
Systems generating authentic player traditions and emergent social structures over scripted content.
05
TECHNICAL AUTHENTICITY
Real-world IT expertise embedded in believable in-fiction tech systems. The infrastructure isn't decoration, it's the same stack the operator runs in life.
06
FACTION + TERRITORIAL CONSEQUENCE
Faction systems with meaningful political consequence and territorial control. Procedural content via lore-justified multiversal rifts, with seasonal world migration keeping community continuity across dimensional jumps.
Drill deeper
▸ Tenure 003 · 2024 → live
The studio flagship and the live game it ships behind it, in depth, engine, world, systems, and the AI-augmented pipeline that makes a solo open world possible.
Read the dossier · PDF →
▸ The stack underneath
The 24-year IT record that lets me self-host a live game without a cloud bill, Sony QA, Geek Squad, 13+ years as single-admin across 600+ endpoints.
See /systems →