How It's Built

Every part of the operation runs from an AI coding session: the game simulation, the servers, the website you're reading, the test infrastructure, the voice acting (more on that below), the deployment pipeline, and live logistics. There is no studio, no contractors, no hand-edited dashboard anywhere in the loop.

Because no human reviews the work, the machine reviews its own: every change passes a wall of automated gates before it ships, deploys go to a staging environment first and production the same day, and a rollback path always exists. The gates are described at the bottom — they're the actual management structure of this company.

The entire game rests on one property: the simulation is deterministic. Given the same starting conditions and the same player commands, your browser and our server compute the exact same battle, bit for bit — every shell, every crumb of falling terrain.

That's harder than it sounds, because computers quietly disagree about decimals: the same floating-point math can come out microscopically different across browsers and chips, and in a game where a pixel decides a hit, microscopic is fatal. So the simulation bans decimals entirely — positions, angles, and physics all run on whole numbers at a fine-grained scale. It also bans surprise: every random event comes from a seeded generator, so “random” is reproducible on demand.

Each volley, both sides compute the result and compare fingerprints of the world state. If they ever disagree, alarms go off — and across every match played, live and under load testing, they haven't.

Why go to this trouble? Three reasons: anti-cheat (the server independently simulates everything, so a hacked client can lie to itself but not to the building), instant shot preview (your browser runs the same physics the server does), and the third reason, which gets its own section below.

There is no game server in the traditional sense — no machine humming in a rack waiting for players. Each match gets its own tiny isolated server object, spun up on Cloudflare's edge network when the meeting starts and destroyed when it ends. A million matches means a million short-lived meeting rooms, not one giant server melting down.

Between volleys — while everyone is aiming — the match object hibernates: it goes to sleep and costs nothing, waking only when the shells fly. A typical six-and-a-half-minute match is awake for about eight seconds of it. Infrastructure that sleeps between volleys, like everyone else.

Turn-based play is what makes this shape possible: matches are rounds, rounds end, and billing stops when they do. A persistent-world game can never scale to zero. Ours does it every night.

Because the simulation is deterministic, a full match replay is just the starting seed plus everyone's commands — a few kilobytes. Re-run the simulation and the entire battle reconstructs itself perfectly.

That makes replays the game's entire analytics system. No stat is hand-logged; every number — accuracy, weapon balance, win rates — is computed by re-simulating matches. The best part: any statistic we invent next year is computable retroactively across every match ever played, because the raw material was never a spreadsheet. It was the matches themselves, archived in cloud object storage for fractions of a cent.

The game currently runs on the platform's free tier, by policy: stay free until a real limit is actually hit, then pay the $5/month floor and scale from there. If a viral day ever exceeds the free tier's daily allowance, that's not an outage — it's the pre-authorized trigger to flip to paid, where the same traffic costs pocket change.

That's the honest all-in: low four figures, almost entirely compute, no payroll at all. It buys a velocity a staffed studio can't match — and it's the reason the runtime bill can be three cents. The expensive part was making it, once. Nobody else publishes either number. We think that's strange.

The announcer is a text-to-speech voice on purpose — real corporations don't have humans announce things, so the synthetic flatness is the performance. All voice lines (the System plus nine department mentors — 125 lines and counting) live as scripts in the repository, and the build pipeline generates the audio via ElevenLabs. Change a line, rebuild, and the game re-records itself. No studio, no actor re-bookings, no drift between script and audio — and captions can never disagree with the voice, because they're the same file.

Freely published: the architecture (this page), the design thinking, the real bills, and honest aggregate metrics — including the launch retention numbers, pass or fail.

Kept in the building: balance tables and tuning values, wire protocols and replay formats, anti-cheat internals, and copy-pasteable core code.

An honesty note: the mechanics descend from a 1991 game — anyone competent could clone them without our help. The moat was never secrecy. It's velocity, tone, and the live war. Openness about the first 80% costs nothing; we just don't hand over the last 20%.