One pair of hands, and every tool I could find.

There was never a school for this. No computer science degree, no formal art training, no studio to apprentice in. For years that felt like a closed door: the ideas were there in full detail, but the distance between imagining a game and actually building one was measured in years of training I did not have and could not afford to go and get.

AI closed that distance. Not by making the game — it cannot, and it did not — but by being the tutor I could ask the stupid questions at two in the morning, and the extra pair of hands I was never going to be able to hire. I still make every design decision, and I still decide what is good enough to ship. What changed is that I can act on those decisions now instead of filing them away as things I would build if I were someone else.

So everything here is self-taught, and openly assisted. The art was generated and then curated, cut and assembled by me. The code was written with help and read line by line by me. If a thing is in the game, it is because I looked at it and decided it earned its place. That is the only credential I have.

This is the beginning of a creative career rather than the middle of one. The first game out of it is Palimpsest Idle, an idle action-RPG that takes place on the page.