A no-code, AI-native game engine for building living worlds — and Ashen Reach, the multiplayer RPG being built with it.
Direct beautiful visual stories. Fill them with characters who are genuinely alive. Build it all without code — and let an AI build it with you. A proprietary game engine written in Rust, built on Calyx (grounded AI), rendering Warcraft‑class worlds — all on one machine.
▶ Watch on YouTube · the AI-native, no-code engine and Ashen Reach, the permadeath RPG built with it — broken down end to end.
Status — active development. This README is the vision, captured as a living backlog of 400+ atomic tasks. State lives in GitHub Issues (start at the pinned START HERE).
Two things live here: ① the Engine ("Light in the Dark") — a Warcraft-III-World-Editor-class no-code creation platform; and ② the first Game ("Ashen Reach") — an original, multiplayer, full-loot, roleplay-enforced RPG built with the engine to prove it can build anything. Every name, god, and tale in Ashen Reach is wholly original.
First, the tool: a game creator that anyone can use, that an AI can drive, and that runs entirely on your own machine.
Players don't stay for stats — they stay for emotion, character, and choices that matter. So the whole engine is built to tell stories visually. You don't write code; you direct scenes: stage characters, set the mood and lighting, frame the camera, branch the dialogue, score the moment. Branching dialogue, cinematics, environmental storytelling, a Calyx-grounded lore bible, and an AI co-writer make telling an unforgettable story feel like play.
The Warcraft III World Editor was legendary because it was opinionated and effortless: copy a unit, tweak its stats, snap together Event → Condition → Action blocks, and you had a game. We're rebuilding that magic. An Object Editor to copy-paste-customize units, heroes, abilities, and items; a visual Trigger Editor for no-code logic; a Terrain Editor; asset managers; live in-editor playtest. WC3-simple on the surface, infinitely deep underneath. The magic is the simplicity of piecing together an entire game.
We build the editor first (the Warcraft III model — make the World Editor, then make the world with it). Here is what that editor looks like and how you author a game in it. Mock-ups of the target UI — every panel here maps to a tracked engine epic.
This is the heart of the editor. You build from a bird's-eye view of your whole world, rendered live at game quality, with an always-on minimap — in the layout millions already know from the Warcraft III World Editor: mode tabs across the top (Terrain · Objects · Triggers · Cinematics · VFX · AI Co-Author), a world hierarchy on the left, the active tool on the right, your asset library along the bottom. Easy to work by hand — and the AI Co-Author sits right beside the manual tools for when you want it. Most people will start by hand and reach for the AI over time; both drive the same world (#1225 / #1226 / #1229 / #1230).
Press Playtest — and it snaps into the game. The bird's-eye edit camera drops straight into the actual game camera — top-down, isometric, over-the-shoulder, or first-person — so you are inside your world in one click, then snap right back to keep building (#1227 / #1228).
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One workspace. A dockable shell — scene hierarchy, a real-time PBR viewport with transform gizmos, an inspector, and a content browser of your assets. The same look your finished game ships with, live while you build it. (Each tool panel below pops out and gets as rich as it needs — built individually.)
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Humans and AI — both, on the same canvas. Every capability is one shared layer with two front-ends: the GUI and an MCP tool. A person can build the whole game by hand; an AI agent can build the whole game through tools; or both work the same project at once — say "make this forest feel haunted at dusk" and watch the fog roll in, the spirits appear, and the color grade cool. Nothing is human-only; nothing is AI-only.
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Great games are found by iterating fast — the best teams ship many playable builds a day to "find the fun." So the editor is built around two tight feedback loops, for humans and for AI, and they look completely different (#1166):
- Humans get the instant, immersive loop: one click into your world, hot-reload while you play, a live game-feel/responsiveness readout, and a place to drop notes mid-play — then snap back and tweak. The metric is time-to-fun (#1168).
- AI agents get the headless, verdicted loop: spin up the deterministic sim with no window, run assertions and frame-watching bug oracles in parallel, and get back a structured, fix-oriented pass/fail with the actual values — the error is the prompt — so an agent can test everything it just built and iterate in seconds (#1167).
Both run on Calyx: Aster snapshots fork and restore world-state, the Loom reactive engine streams events, the Ledger records every turn for replay, and Assay / Oracle / Ward give balance, what-if, and safety signals before a run even starts.
The core architectural bet: every capability of the editor is an agent-controllable MCP tool. The GUI and the MCP server are two faces of one capability layer. Tell an AI agent "build a dungeon crawl with an emotional intro and a boss that taunts the party" — and it authors the terrain, units, abilities, triggers, dialogue, VFX, and agents end-to-end, then plays it back to verify its own work.
Calyx is a Rust grounded-association engine — an intelligent database that ingests everything (logs, bits, game-state signals), finds associations, and decides when to wake and prompt the world's AI agents. It runs locally on the RTX 5090 with 50 diverse embedder "lenses" (image, audio, text, semantic, medical, legal, finance, code, DNA, molecule, protein) so it understands content across every modality. It keeps the AI honest: anything out-of-distribution — a wrong answer, impossible physics — fails closed rather than hallucinating.
Not scripted behavior trees — actual AI agents, right-sized to their role: tiny ~5 MB models animate objects and particles; small local LLMs (Gemma-class 2–4B) give NPCs in-character conversation. A guardian system (Ward) bounds what agents may do — creative inside the envelope, impossible actions refused at the edge.
Bind a mind in seconds. Pick an NPC, write a prompt, choose a model, set its personality — and it wakes up. No code. The same tools an AI uses to build the world, you use to fill it with souls.
Everything is rendered by our own proprietary game engine, written in Rust on wgpu (Vulkan/DX12/Metal) — built on permissive open-source foundations, with our own WGSL shaders. Honest visual target: best-in-class stylized real-time PBR — the look of Sunderfolk, Warcraft III Reforged, or League of Legends: Forward+ lighting, cascaded shadows, bloom/tonemap/color-grade, dense GPU particles. Beautiful, achievable, and — critically — it scales down to run on a modest PC where photoreal can't.
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🧠 CALYX — the knowledge + backend layer (Rust, GPU, 50 lenses): the database, search,
dedup, provenance, the AI agent runtime, and orchestration
│ the ENGINE is BUILT ON Calyx │ ── lowering valve (one-way, frozen) ──►
🦀 ENGINE (Rust, on Calyx):
⚙️ deterministic SIM — fixed-point, zero-alloc, replayable ← only place excluded from live Calyx
🎨 RENDERER (wgpu) — Forward+ PBR, shadows, post-FX, particles ← consumes a sim snapshot
🛠️ EDITOR (egui, on engine + Calyx) — the product + an MCP server
It's all Rust now — a single proprietary engine built on Calyx as its backend brain (we dropped g3n and Go entirely; no cgo). The sim core is bit-exact and replayable; the lowering valve is the only bridge to it, so the world is alive and deterministic at once. It runs locally on one workstation — Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 5090 (32 GB), 128 GB RAM — maxed out for creating.
The Battle.net model: you build with the full power of a high-end workstation, but the games you ship run on a $500–$1,000 Windows PC (~Ryzen 5 / RX 6600 / 16 GB) at 1080p60, scaling up to ultra on a 5090. A graphics quality scale (with open-source FSR upscaling) carries the stylized look from min-spec to max — and the engine ships that look by default, so a non-coder gets Warcraft-class quality with zero tuning.
Beyond building games, the platform is a Battle.net-style ecosystem: publish and share your games, browse and download others', host servers (200–500 players), join via localhost / LAN / SSH / invite, climb ladders, and play each other's worlds. Build it, share it, play together.
The result: a world that thinks. Calyx watches the whole realm at once and decides, moment to moment, which characters, creatures, and objects to bring to life — so the world feels alive whether two players or two hundred are online.
To prove the engine can build anything, we're building the hardest thing: an original RPG with the systemic depth of the legendary 30-year permadeath MUDs. A realm called Vhael, where death is permanent and your name is the only thing that outlives you. This is its story.
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The world is built as connected top-down regions, each with its own dangers, inhabitants, and resets. Among them:
- Galdmere — the great free city and neutral crossroads; home of the mourning-wall.
- The Ashen Reach — the grey, half-real scar of the Sundering; thin Weave, the rarest relics, the worst monsters.
- Vael Mourn — a drowned coastal city of bells; seat of the Vesper Court.
- Karthspire — a black fortress-mountain; throne of the Onyx Dominion.
- The Sunspire — the white citadel of the Dawnward.
- The Verdict Halls — fortified courts of the Iron Verdict.
- The Thornwilds — trackless ancient forest and moor; domain of the Thornwild and the druids.
- Hollowgate Deeps — caverns where the Hollow Pact keeps its shrines and the Outer Dark leaks closest.
- Drakemarch — highland lairs of the Ashen Dragons.
- The Infernal Deeps — the brutal hell-realm at the bottom of the world, where the most insane relics are born.
Seven gods watch over Vhael. They rarely act directly — they work through sworn mortals, granting divine power to those who prove their devotion through roleplay. A god may favor you, or forsake you for betraying their nature.
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…with Whisanne (Passion, Courage, Wisdom) and Orthuun (Order, Judgment) completing the seven.
Player-run orders, each sworn to a cause. Join one, rise through its ranks by roleplay, and wage war for its survival. Membership is lifelong; betrayal is costly.
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The Hollow Pact (Evil) — scholars and cultists who bargain with the beings of the Outer Dark for power no one should hold. Lead as the Chancellor of the Veil.
Every faction's power flows from a single item-of-power, guarded by Inner and Outer guardians in its hideout. Steal a rival's item and carry it to your shrine, and their members lose their powers until they take it back. This drives perpetual, high-stakes raiding warfare, shifting alliances, and faction politics — the endgame of Vhael.
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Every great RPG is defined by the terrors it pits you against. These are the legends of the realm — the foes that take a party, a plan, and a great deal of luck.
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These are the gameplay benchmark — actual top-down/isometric real-time RPG play: full HUD, ability hotbars, floating damage, minimaps, party frames. This is the quality bar every game built in the editor should reach, and it runs on a $500–$1,000 PC.
Real-time party combat — a boss health bar, floating crits, a named ability hotbar, chat, and minimap. Deep, readable, fast.
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Every class is a deep toolkit. Martials master ~20–30 skills and specializations; spellcasters and priests command 60–100 spells across schools and paths. Build your character; no two are alike.
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…and it all runs on a modest PC, built no-code in the Editor. |
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Generic fantasy peoples plus original kindreds of Vhael. Lifespan (and so death-by-aging) varies by kindred — elves and giants outlast humans by generations. Each has its own attribute caps, resistances, innate gifts, and allowed classes.
| Kindred | Nature | Lifespan |
|---|---|---|
| Human | versatile, ambitious, found everywhere | short |
| Elf | keen-minded and quick, but frail | very long |
| Half-Elf | balanced and adaptable | long |
| Wood-Elf | sturdier, nature-bound elves | very long |
| Dark-Elf | nimble, intelligent, drawn to shadow | very long |
| Ashkin (original) | grey, Hollow-touched elves — distrusted, gifted in thin places | very long |
| Dwarf | hardy, poison/magic-resistant, proud | long |
| Deep Dwarf | evil, agile kin of the dwarves | long |
| Gnome | small, tough, wisest of folk | long |
| Deep Gnome | strong, very wise cavern gnomes | long |
| Orc | savage, strong, destructive | short |
| Goblin | cunning, weak, sly | short |
| Minotaur | rare, mighty, fierce | medium |
| Centaur | swift, proud, untamed | medium |
| Storm Giant | towering, lightning-blooded | very long |
| Fire Giant | burning, brutal | very long |
| Frost Giant | immense, cold-hearted | very long |
| Cloud Giant | vast and aloof | very long |
| Sylphkin (original) | winged bird-folk of the high crags | medium |
| Felisar (original) | agile cat-kin of the southern wastes | medium |
| Saur (original) | cold-blooded scale-folk of the drowned coasts | medium |
Generic archetypes, deeply specialized. Attributes use Vhael's six pillars — Might, Finesse, Intellect, Spirit, Endurance, Presence. Priests (✝) must earn divine empowerment through roleplay to unlock their full power.
| Class | Role | Prime | Alignment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warrior | peerless weapons master; weapon specializations + signature legacies | Might | Any |
| Berserker | frenzied destroyer (the savage kindreds' calling) | Might | Evil |
| Raider | savage skirmisher — warrior/thief hybrid | Might/Finesse | Neutral/Evil |
| Ranger | wilderness warrior, archery & beast-companions | Might | Any |
| Thief | stealthy rogue — poisons, traps, theft, paths of specialization | Finesse | Any |
| Assassin | poisoner & martial artist | Finesse | Any |
| Bard | musician & loremaster; songs of power | Presence | Any |
| Paladin ✝ | holy knight, blade and blessing | Might | Good |
| Unhallowed Knight ✝ | unholy knight; soul-bound weapon grows with every kill | Might | Evil |
| Shaman ✝ | offensive war-priest; deity-granted paths | Spirit | Good/Evil |
| Healer ✝ | defensive priest, unmatched at mending | Spirit | Any |
| Druid ✝ | nature priest; beast-forms, wilderness power | Spirit | Neutral |
| Invoker | elementalist mage — seven elemental paths | Intellect | Any |
| Transmuter | alteration mage — twist body and matter | Intellect | Any |
| Conjurer | summoner mage — bind extraplanar allies | Presence | Any |
| Necromancer | death mage — undead, life-drain; may undergo the Withering | Intellect | Evil |
| Shapeshifter | form-changing mage — animal & monstrous forms | Intellect | Any |
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Death is permanent, and it erodes you. Your constitution is your hold on life. Every few deaths costs a permanent point of it — and when it runs out, your character is gone forever. There is no respawn, no second chance.
And even the careful die. Every character ages and, in time, dies of old age — and lifespan depends on your race: elves and the long-lived outlast humans by generations. A life hoarded is a life wasted. This is why the realm's only greeting is: by what name do you wish to be mourned?
In a world where every character truly dies, death must mean something. So when a character falls for the last time, they are not deleted — they are enshrined.
In Galdmere, the mourning-wall carries the names of the fallen, carved in stone for as long as the world stands. When a character dies for the last time, the realm stops to remember them — and a new name is added to the wall.
① A graveyard for the fallen. Every permanently-dead character earns a place in the Hall of the Remembered — a vast, browsable memorial of everyone who ever lived and died in the world. Their name, their lineage, their faction, the span of their life: all kept, forever, for anyone to visit.
② A legend, enshrined. Each memorial is a highlight reel of a life: the bosses slain, the relics held, the raids won, the ranks reached, the titles earned — and the eulogies and tributes written by other players. It lets the whole world see exactly how badass that character was. Your character dies, but your legend endures.
③ Why we mourn. Remembering the dead is one of the deepest human needs — it is why we hold funerals. The same reasons apply here, exactly: mourning gives meaning to loss, honors a legacy, brings closure, and binds a community in shared memory. This is the emotional heart of the whole game. Permadeath without remembrance is just punishment; permadeath with a memorial is what makes a life — and its risks, and its end — truly matter.
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At the bottom of the world, below the scar of the Sundering, lies Hell — the Infernal Deeps. A realm of devils and fire ruled by arch-tyrants, where the Weave is gone entirely and only ferocity and ambition survive. It is the single most lethal place in Vhael — and the only source of the world's mightiest relics. This is where legends are forged, and where most of them die.
The Deeps are ordered hell — hierarchy, legions, and bargains — distinct from the formless eldritch horror of the Outer Dark. Here, everything wants something from you, and everything can be negotiated with… for a price.
There is no recall into the Deeps. You earn the descent, by one of several perilous paths:
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Hell descends in seven circles, each deadlier than the last, each with its own hazards, its own legions, and its own ruling lord.
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The Deeps are the purest expression of the realm's creed: the greatest power demands the greatest risk. There is no recall and no safety; demon patrols never stop; the environment itself — heat, dark, soul-drain — wears your life and constitution down with every step. Die deep in Hell and your corpse, and everything you carry, is all but unrecoverable — a full-loot prize for demons or rival players. A single Infernal run can cost a character their life permanently.
But those who conquer it return with the artifacts that reshape the balance of the entire world — and a name that will be carved on the mourning-wall and sung of for an age. To descend into the Deeps and walk back out is the pinnacle of any story in Ashen Reach.
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The Immortals are AI and human — seamlessly. A god like Korthac might be driven by a Calyx AI agent one hour and a human admin the next, granting rulings and rewards as one consistent deity. The world's gods are always present, always watching — and players can rise to become them.
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Host a world for everyone. Anyone can run a server on their own machine — up to ~500 players — and friends connect over localhost, LAN, an SSH tunnel, or a direct invite. Admins control who plays and how strictly roleplay is watched and rewarded. The benchmark for success: the entire world runs on one personal computer — which means anyone can host it for everyone else.
The end goal: build Ashen Reach — an original RPG with the depth of a 30-year MUD, rendered beautifully, with AI running every god, faction, and NPC. When the engine can build that, it can build anything — and every other kind of game becomes a small feature add-on.
This is the most ambitious no-code game creator ever attempted: the depth of a classic MUD, the accessibility of the Warcraft III editor, the beauty of a modern real-time engine, and the soul of an AI that brings every world to life.
What will you build? And by what name will you be remembered?
Every system, indexed to its tracked issues — so any agent or contributor can find exactly where each capability lives. This is the authoritative map; the issues are the source of truth.
- #884 Visual storytelling is the #1 goal · #885 End-user experience (WC3-simple)
- #915 The engine IS an MCP server (every capability is an agent tool) · #995 Core game design — multiplayer, PvP, full-loot, roleplay-enforced
- #777 Calyx usage · #778 ≥10-diverse-embedder mandate · #800 Engineering & FSV-against-reality standards
- #959 END GOAL — build Ashen Reach to classic-MUD depth · #1055 Original world bible (canonical) · #928 Performance target (the workstation, maxed; no min-spec)
- #730 WC3-style visual editor → WC3-parity sub-epics #801–805, atomic children #806–858
- #717 AI-assisted authoring + the lowering valve + Ward content gate
- #886 Visual storytelling & narrative → directorial layer #909–914, children #887–897
- #898 End-user UX & onboarding → #899–906
- #916 MCP control surface → tool-groups #917–927
- #1072 Custom proprietary Rust engine (BUILD PRIORITY #1) → subsystem epics: foundation #1074 · core/ECS #1080 · renderer(wgpu) #1085 · assets #1098 · animation #1104 · physics #1109 · Calyx backend #1113 · audio #1125 · VFX #1128 · deterministic sim #1132 · editor(egui) #1137 · MCP #1143 · quality/acceptance #1146 (engine doctrine #1071; dep policy #1073). (g3n #861/#873 dropped/superseded.)
- #744 Particle & VFX editor → #745–753
- #781 In-game AI agents (every NPC/object a Calyx agent) → #783–788, #859–860, #965–971
- #782 AI asset-generation pipeline → #789–796
- #770 Local-first platform (Calyx + 50 embedders on Windows + RTX 5090) → #771–776, #694
- Calyx capabilities: #797 Lodestar kernel · #798 Oracle prediction · #799 alerting · #907 replay analytics · #908 asset semantic index
- #933 Ultimate RPG creator → #934–944 · #945 MUD-grade systemic depth → #946–958, #960–964
- #972 Scarcity economy & full-loot PvP → #973–981
- Roleplay engine: #982 RP-quality measurement · #983 rank/power progression · #996 bad-RP punishment · #997 player social graph · #998 faction ambition & leadership
- #1037 Self-hosted servers & dead-simple multiplayer → #1038–1044
- Immortals (AI + human, hybrid): #965–967, #1045–1047
- Mortality & the dark paths: #1060 constitution/permadeath/aging · #1061 undeath (the Withering) · #1062 the Unhallowed Knight soul-weapon · #1063 the Infernal Deeps (Hell) · #1064 hardest raid + secret undeath path · #1065 the Hall of the Remembered (memorial)
- Content build: #984 full world build → #985–994; 21 races #999–1019; 17 classes #1020–1036
- Lore: #1048 lore system → #1049–1054; world bible #1055; lore compendium #1056–1059
Every content category has both an illustrated overview here and an exhaustive, atomic spec in the issues:
- 21 Kindreds (races) — overview table above; full per-race specs (stat caps, resistances, innate gifts, allowed classes, lifespan, model) at #999–1019.
- 17 Classes — overview table above; full per-class specs (leveled ability lists, specializations/paths/forms, restrictions) at #1020–1036.
- 7 Factions + 7 Gods — lore in Part II; mechanics & per-entity build at #945/#948/#949/#990, world bible #1055, lore compendium #1056–1059.
- Bestiary & bosses — the 10 mightiest beings gallery + the Ashen Dragons & Outer Dark above; all mobs/creatures/bosses = data + engine-native models + Calyx agents at #991.
- Abilities/spells/skills/songs/powers — one universal ability framework #961; per-ability content + VFX at #988.
- Items — scarcity-tiered itemization #972–981; full item set + models at #989.
- World/regions, quests, lore text — gazetteer above; areas #987, quests #931/#992, original lore authored via #1048–1059.
- Mortality, undeath, the Infernal Deeps, the Hall of the Remembered — #1060–1065.
The README is the illustrated map; the issues are the exhaustive, build-ready specification. Together they leave no blindspot.
For agents: start at the pinned START HERE issue (#780), then the doctrine above. Every task carries a Full-State-Verification-in-reality close gate (#800). State lives in the issues — keep them current.
Light in the Dark · the world of Ashen Reach
📋 Browse the 470+ issue backlog → · A proprietary Rust engine built on Calyx · Windows · RTX 5090