About this log
Hi, I'm Nick.
I'm a solo developer and founder. I build web apps in Laravel for a living, and in September 2026 I started building a game for my kids.
That game is Brackenmere: a storybook village with mazes beyond its gates, built one evening and one playtest at a time. This log is how it got made.
Why a maze game
It started on a Sunday with a brain dump between me and my son of everything we wanted in a game: a village to come home to, mazes to get lost in and monsters to fight. My kids are the playtesters. When they get lost, get bored or find it funny to swing a sword at the sheep, it goes straight on the list.
How it gets built
I don't write most of the code. A team of AI agents does, each on its own piece of work, with a reviewer checking it and a set of standing rules I keep adding to. My job is the brief, the playtests and the taste: deciding what is fun, what is too much for an eight-year-old and what to throw away.
Why write it up
Building with agents moves fast, and plenty of what we try gets rebuilt within days. These posts are the record: what I asked for, what came back, what the kids made of it and what I would do again.
Away from the keyboard you'll find us on a hill somewhere. The rest of the time, we're in Brackenmere.