Die Forward
A roguelite where your death becomes someone else's loot. Shipped solo in three weeks.
A social roguelite on Solana where player deaths create persistent gameplay content for others. Stake SOL to enter a procedurally generated dungeon; if you die, your corpse, final words, and stake remain for the next player. If you win, take your stake back plus a 50% bonus from the Memorial Pool.
What I was solving
Most roguelites are private experiences — your death is logged in your own save file and forgotten. I wanted to find out whether on-chain economics could make a single-player loop feel social without breaking it. Constraint: ship a real, playable game in three weeks, solo, with the production work that normally takes a team handled differently.
How I built it
Expo for the client, Solana plus MagicBlock for stake escrow and persistence, InstantDB for real-time state. The stack wasn’t the interesting work — the pipeline was. I designed the specs and made the calls; the manufacturing happened around me. I stayed in the loop as product, art director, and editor. Same loop I now use across every project I touch.
What happened
Hackathon prototype shipped in three weeks (Feb 2026); a Phase 1 expansion (Mar 2026) added zones, item rarity, legendary drops, and player-choice explore branches. The quieter thing isn’t the game — it’s that the rules that let a human play also let an agent play, same economy, same outcomes. Die Forward is the first thing in the lab where humans and agents are equal participants in the same world.