Lab

The things I build after hours.

Infrastructure is the day job. This is everything else: the game, the 3D, the novel I keep coming back to because building them is the part I love. I'll share each one here as it grows, mess and all.

Three side projects I can't put down

  • AI
  • Godot
  • Blender
  • Writing

My day job is making infrastructure boring, and I'm genuinely good at boring. But the projects that keep me up past midnight are anything but: a game, a heap of 3D, a novel. I build them because I want them to exist, and I bring along the same AI tooling I trust at work. The discipline comes with me. So does the fun.

RACCOON FPS, in Godot

RACCOON FPS is the one I'm proudest of: a cyber-noir immersive sim in the lineage of Deus Ex, Quake, and the early Elder Scrolls games. One raccoon, a whole city of secrets, augmentations you slot in as you move. I'm no game developer; I just really wanted this to exist, so I've been building it in Godot night after night. AI helps with the code and the iteration, but it never skips review: it's a fast, confident junior that's wrong with total conviction, and catching that is half the fun. Every session it looks a little more like the thing in my head. A few weeks back the menu was held together with emoji; now there's a proper skyline and a rendered raccoon prowling a cyber-noir city.

RACCOON FPS v0.2 alpha main menu: a rendered raccoon on a rooftop in a neon-lit cyber-noir city
RACCOON FPS · v0.2 alpha, Godot 4.7
The earlier RACCOON FPS menu, a flat screen with emoji level icons
where it started, a few weeks earlier

Assets in Blender, over MCP

The 3D is where I'm most out of my depth, and where AI really earns its keep. I drive Blender over MCP so the model can pose, render, and export assets while I play art director instead of fighting every vertex. It's a first-pass machine: brilliant for getting something on screen, still needing a human to say what's actually good. That raccoon didn't model itself; it didn't model entirely by hand either.

NEONFEHLER, in review

And then there's the one with no code in it at all. NEONFEHLER is my first novel, an absurd, comic techno-fantasy, drafted with AI in the loop, cover and all, and now in human review before Amazon. I'll share how this first iteration actually holds up and compare it against a second book I've already started. The jokes are mine, and so are the bad decisions; the most personal thing on this page.

Cover of NEONFEHLER by Hipolit Badowski: a neon-glitch black cat with green eyes
NEONFEHLER · cover

What actually transfers

None of this pays the bills, and that's exactly why I love it. The funny part is how much loops back to the day job: the patience, the small steps, the habit of keeping a human in the loop. Whatever survives, I fold into my skill-mania repo so the next real project gets it for free. I'll keep posting here as these grow. Come back sometime.

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