The person building Grundval
Twelve-plus years of full-stack engineering, now pointed entirely at one dark fantasy deckbuilder.
I've shipped production software in small teams and large organizations, usually owning the parts where mistakes are expensive: payments, data correctness, systems under real load. Most of that was banking, where "it mostly works" is not an acceptable state.
Recently that's meant AI-powered applications and the architecture around them — which is also what made a project this size possible alone.
Twelve years of that experience went into other companies' products. Now I'm putting that experience into building something of my own.
Apart from development, I play board games — Grundval started as ideas borrowed from The Witcher: Old World and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, with some of its tone owed to Black Book.
It started on paper. Before a line of code existed, the combat was cards on a table — draw a hand, commit a combo, remove cards as damage, and see whether the loop was any good. Everything since has been implementation.
The second experiment came after. I've been deep in AI tooling since 2025, and I wanted to find out whether one person could take something this size all the way through — documentation, design, art direction, code, and story — with that tooling as the pipeline rather than an autocomplete. Specifications first, generation as a drafting step, a person deciding what ships.
The interesting part is that over a decade of engineering habits — specs, version control, reproducible builds, honest scoping — transfers almost completely to creative work, and the tooling has finally caught up enough to make a solo attempt reasonable rather than delusional.
Hollowfort is the first chapter. Grundval is the series. The public site and the playable beta are where the experiment meets players.
For playtest notes or professional questions, LinkedIn and email both reach me. Feedback from a finished Hollowfort beta game is especially useful.