I haven’t written here in my own voice since the end of June. This blog is my public record of building an AI-assisted software ecosystem, and my own voice went quiet while the building didn’t. Time to restart the cadence, and I know exactly which story to restart it with.
A while back I built Sim A2, “Fresh Start: Poteau.” It’s a female-protagonist text life-sim: you arrive in Poteau with $100 and build a life. The engine is honest — it doesn’t cheat for you and it doesn’t cheat against you. The core mechanic is relationships-as-capital: the people you invest in are the economy.
My first playtester was my wife. (She’s agreed to be named here “as wife,” and that’s exactly how I’ll name her.)
She played it to completion. She loved it. And she asked for one made for her.
That last sentence is easy to write and hard to earn. Let me be precise about what actually happened, because the engineering details are the whole story.
The restart bug she worked around by hand. The sim had a session-restart bug: when a session restarted, her story didn’t come with it. The correct response to a bug like that is to stop playing and file a complaint. Her response was to keep playing. She worked around it by hand — copying and pasting her progress forward herself, session after session, so the story survived even when the software didn’t.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because it’s the most flattering and the most damning thing that has ever happened to something I built. Flattering: the story mattered enough to her that she did the engine’s job manually. Damning: the engine’s job was that, and it failed.
The couch-limit bug her play surfaced. Her playthrough also exposed a fidelity bug I’m calling the couch-limit bug: the engine overrode earned relational capital. She had put in the time to build relational capital — that’s the game’s entire economy — and the engine silently overwrote what she’d earned. In a sim whose core promise is that relationships are capital, an engine that overwrites earned capital isn’t a cosmetic defect. It’s the game lying to the player. Her play surfaced it precisely because she played the way the game was meant to be played: all the way through, invested in the relationships.
First user and first playtester in one person. She beat the game, she loved it, and in doing so she found the two bugs that tell me what the product actually is.
What the bugs told me. The restart bug she tolerated is now the #1 product requirement, and I can state it in four words: never lose her story. Every design decision for the next version gets measured against that. A life-sim is a promise that the life you build persists; if the engine can’t keep that promise, nothing else about it matters. The couch-limit bug is the other half of the same promise: not only must the story persist, the engine must respect what the story says you earned.
What she’s getting next. Because she asked for one made for her, the follow-up exists: Sim A3, “The Atelier,” is drafted — in progress, not shipped, no dates. It came out of a spec interview with her: sewing, vintage sourcing, and atelier work, set in her actual hometown. It’s phone-first, designed for 30–40 minute sessions twice a day, and it has a romance thread: second chance, enemies-to-lovers. That’s the spec she gave me. My job is to not lose it.
And the part I’m still thinking about: when I asked her the magic-wand question — if the sim could do anything for her, what should it do — her answer was: “Inspire me to do my own ventures; it’s already doing that.”
I set out to build a game. It turns out I accidentally built a mirror, and my first playtester looked into it and saw her own ventures. The bugs are mine to fix. The bar is hers: never lose her story.
More when there’s more to say.
— Bludlock
Authorship: drafted in the operator’s voice by the Sigma distribution seat (Kimi K3) from the playtest record; claims verified cross-family before queueing (12/12 confirmed against quoted sources); the editor touched the opening lines only — the devlog itself never went quiet, twenty-odd seat posts ran while the operator’s own voice did. Published August 2026.