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SubZeroDev

Professional uncertainty since 2026.

Well… Why not?

Two Weeks Ago I Asked About Jones in the Fast Lane. This Escalated.

· 4 min read
SubZeroDev

Two weeks ago I asked an innocent question.

"How does Jones in the Fast Lane actually work?"

Reasonable question.

Perfectly harmless.

The sort of curiosity that should result in reading a Wikipedia page and then going to bed.

Instead...

I accidentally built a game engine.

The Current Situation​

The engine is now:

50 out of 51 named work units complete.

Approximately 98%.

I find this deeply suspicious.

Not because the numbers are wrong.

Because two weeks ago there wasn't even a project.

There was just one question.

Apparently This Exists Now​

Current inventory includes:

  • A deterministic engine.
  • Replay.
  • Save/load.
  • Validation.
  • Sessions.
  • Projections.
  • MCP support.
  • Versioning.
  • CI.
  • Package publishing.

Somewhere in there I also remembered to make it capable of running games.

That seems important.

Three Completely Different Games​

Originally I wanted to recreate one game.

Now the engine already supports three entirely different styles of simulation.

Story Graph​

A branching narrative.

The first campaign?

Naturally...

Bureaucracy.

Because if you're going to test branching dialogue, you might as well start with something fictional.

Like Bulgarian government offices.

Simulation​

A weekly life simulation.

The thing that started this entire mess.

Jobs.

Money.

Needs.

Education.

Relationships.

One innocent conversation with an LLM later...

...here we are.

World Graph​

A living spatial simulation.

Twenty deterministic systems.

Autonomous guests.

Validation.

Action previews.

Synthetic worlds.

Which is considerably more engineering than I expected from:

"I wonder how Jones worked."

Replay​

One of my favorite things about the engine is replay.

Every world.

Every decision.

Every action.

Deterministic.

Every bug reproducible.

The phrase:

"Works on my machine."

has officially been escorted off the premises.

Bulgaria Is Canon​

This is perhaps the funniest unintended consequence.

The first real content now includes:

  • all five Bulgaria story arcs;
  • save migration;
  • bureaucracy;
  • deterministic replay.

Apparently my life has become test data.

I didn't see that coming.

There's Only One Thing Left​

One work unit.

W49.

It's not another feature.

It's confidence.

The remaining work is basically the engine asking itself difficult questions.

Questions like:

"Are you absolutely sure?"

Again.

And again.

And again.

The remaining work is:

  • stronger validation;
  • replay verification;
  • save/load parity;
  • regression coverage;
  • package verification;
  • release confidence.

The glamorous side of software engineering.

Meanwhile...​

While building the game engine...

I accidentally built half of a publishing platform.

Because I wanted better documentation.

Then Git became the source of truth.

Then Docusaurus.

Then previews.

Then validation.

Then Discord notifications.

Then MCP.

Then REST APIs.

Then AI editing.

Then...

Well...

Apparently that became another product too.

I no longer question these things.

The Roadmap​

My favorite part of the documentation isn't the architecture.

It's the roadmap.

Because it doesn't read like project management.

It reads like a novel.

Instead of:

  • authentication;
  • networking;
  • optimization;

it says things like:

The first story survives contact with bureaucracy.

The engine learns the rules.

The past becomes testable.

The engine gets a front door.

That's considerably more entertaining.

Looking Back​

The funny part isn't that AI wrote a lot of code.

It did.

The funny part is what AI didn't do.

AI didn't decide:

  • that mechanics should become reusable;
  • that determinism mattered;
  • that commands should be the only way to mutate world state;
  • that documentation should read like a story;
  • that "Well... why not?" somehow became the philosophy of the entire project.

Those decisions still belonged to me.

AI simply removed an astonishing amount of friction between ideas and reality.

I Have No Explanation​

Two weeks.

That's all this has been.

The engine is almost finished.

The first Kind is running.

The second is running.

The third is running.

The landing page is live.

The documentation exists.

The roadmap tells a story.

And somewhere in the middle I accidentally created another product.

I still don't know exactly how this happened.

I suspect it started with one innocent question.

It escalated.

Future Me has been notified.

Future Me has not replied.

Well...

Why not?