Devlog
Building In The Open.
Notes from a solo founder building Players Engine: engineering decisions, closed-beta lessons, and the problems in gaming communities we're trying to fix. Honest, occasionally messy, written as it happens.
What the closed beta is teaching me
A small group that trusts you to listen beats a big number that stays silent — and other lessons from the first weeks of real users.
Read entry →Fake accounts are ruining gaming communities
Bots, engagement farming, smurfing: why trust is the scarcest resource in online gaming spaces, and why it keeps losing.
Read entry →Running a closed beta with Discord, Sentry and GitHub
The feedback pipeline: forum channels, crash alerts, issue triage, and the weekly rhythm that keeps one person on top of all of it.
Read entry →Building solo with an AI pair programmer
What AI coding assistants are genuinely good at, where they fail, and how a one-person team reviews code it didn't type.
Read entry →The stack: one founder, ten microservices
Why a bootstrapped solo project runs on Cloud Run, a document database and a graph database — and what scale-to-zero really buys you.
Read entry →Why I'm building PlayersEngine
Starting this devlog with the story so far: a gamer's identity is scattered across a dozen launchers, and nobody built it a home.
Read entry →