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.
▸ vfx forge · shipped
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.
Omakase Social, a self-hosted engine to own your social presence.
A social-media operations engine (scheduling, publishing, and a data hub) that lets a business run and own its social presence instead of renting it from a platform. The value prop: helps brokers, influencers, and retail agents build and control their social presence and brand image. Operator-directed by design, one person sets the strategy while AI does the day-to-day lifting, so a small team can manage many accounts without losing the human voice. In development.
▸ omakase social · in development
Brokers, influencers, and retail agents who need a consistent, professional social presence but do not have a full marketing team behind them.
Scheduling, publishing, and a central data hub in one place, so posting cadence, assets, and history live under the operator's control rather than scattered across platforms.
Own, don't rent. The account, the audience relationship, and the data stay with the operator. AI is the force multiplier, not the replacement for the person directing it.
In development at OmakaseSocial.com. Not yet publicly shipped; built in the same operator-directed, AI-augmented pattern as the rest of the stack.
The studio flagship: a single-developer, AI-augmented open-world FPS MMORPG 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.
▸ Meta Machina · open-world cyberpunk FPS MMORPG · solo · AI-augmented pipeline
FULL DOSSIER →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.
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.
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.
Not just a world spec. A universe with a look, a cast, and a sound.
Cinematics, character studies, and world footage produced on the same AI-augmented pipeline that feeds the vertical slice, Kling, MidJourney, RunwayML, ElevenLabs, and Adobe. Concept, direction, edit, and sound are mine end to end.
A character study from the cast, cinematic look-dev under the cel-shaded Meta Machina aesthetic.
A two-hander from the universe cast, animated in-world loop.
World footage cut to an original track I produced, motion, edit, and sound design in one pass.
▸ Rifters, the inhabitants of the rift, a curated set of the character-design loops driving the cast
Concept to finished video on the Adobe + AI pipeline, how a look moves from idea to shot.
▸ brand hubThe brand hub and community art that ties the universe together across its channels.
▸ community
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. Designed and shipped a live LMSR prediction-market AMM, the automated-market-maker mechanism behind on-chain prediction markets like Augur and Polymarket, with automated odds, share-based outcome tokens, and deterministic settlement across a 9-market layer per match. Ranked ELO, tournaments, clans, and a two-track tutorial round it out, 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 only 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.
A lifetime in games behind every design decision.
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 · 2003Freelance 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The design philosophy underwriting the IP. Most game-design portfolios show screenshots; this is the framework the screenshots came out of.
Progression systems that resist optimization culture. Reward creative expression and personal playstyle. Infinite viable character combinations.
Eliminating traditional MMO UI clutter for authentic social dynamics. Visual-only player recognition over UI-based identity.
Every element serves narrative purpose. Meta Crystal energy economics. Faction territory reflecting resource scarcity, not arbitrary balance.
Systems generating authentic player traditions and emergent social structures over scripted content.
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.
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.
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.
▸ THE STACK UNDERNEATHThe two-decade 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.