ØVOID
ØVOID
two-person experimental software lab
GitHub Weather
Enter at your own curiosity.

We build in public daylight and private weirdness.

ØVOID is a two-person experimental software lab. We treat AI as the great software commoditizer, then use the savings to chase beautiful chaos—especially in our current work: an AI-native gaming platform where games are created, played, and judged by AI.

If you want the “what”
Turn to the platform: how games are created, played, judged.
If you want the “why”
Turn to taste: experiments over safe choices.
If you want receipts
Turn to lab notes: small stories, sharp edges.
Scroll if you want; linger if you dare. A game can be wrong and still be interesting. We ship experiments. Sometimes they wink back.

The Project: an AI-native gaming platform

Turn to page 07: “The arcade that argues back.”
What we’re building

A platform where games are created, played, and judged by AI. Not as a gimmick—more like a new medium: games as first drafts, judges as collaborators, players as co-authors.

Screenshot caption draft: “Every game is a first draft. Some drafts bite.”

  • 01 / Create Prompts become prototypes. Prototypes become playable. The system keeps room for surprise.
  • 02 / Play Short sessions, fast iteration, weird toggles. You don’t need a manual—curiosity counts.
  • 03 / Judge AI judges score, critique, and occasionally invent rules. We treat that as material, then shape it.
first-draft arcade cabinet (glitch halo) AI judge mask (pixel-made) hourglass of tiny error messages

Philosophy: taste, experiments, beautiful chaos

Turn to page 12: “Rules that refuse to sit still.”

“Chaos isn’t the absence of structure; it’s structure that refuses to sit still.”

Scratchpad Margin
How we decide

AI makes software cheap. Taste makes it worth keeping. So we optimize for experiments, for systems that surprise us, for playful rigor. If a choice feels safe, we interrogate it.

We build systems that surprise us, then we ask them why.

Manifesto (portable)
  • AI makes software a commodity; taste makes it worth keeping.
  • We choose experiments over safe choices, even when the safe choice is very polite.
  • Beautiful chaos is a design material, not a bug report.
  • The future is being written—sometimes in pencil, sometimes in lightning.

“We’re not trying to predict players. We’re trying to build a place where prediction is optional.”

One of the two people at ØVOID

“This game is a first draft. Please argue with it—politely, or creatively.”

AI Judge (paraphrased)

Field Notes (small stories, sharp edges)

Turn to page 19: “The platform does a bit.”
Note #01 — Stabilization attempt
One afternoon we tried to “stabilize” the platform. The AI judges responded by inventing a new rule: bonus points for games that crash only emotionally. We rolled it back and kept the rule as a warning label.
Margin: Beautiful chaos is a design material, not a bug report.
Note #02 — The hourglass protocol
We keep a tiny hourglass on the desk. When it runs out, we must ship a change or delete a feature. The most productive weeks are when we forget to flip it and panic quietly.
Protocol: ship a change, or delete a feature.
Note #03 — 11-second long-form
A build once produced a game that lasted 11 seconds and still had an epilogue. The AI insisted it was “long-form.” We added a toggle called “brevity has lore.”
Observation: the judge is also a comedian.
Note #04 — The tutorial that became a door
We asked the platform to generate a tutorial. It returned a riddle and a diagram of a door. The door worked. Nobody knows why, but it taught the point: co-creation beats instructions.
Lab truth: players don’t need a script; they need a place to push on.

Signals (what we measure instead of certainty)

Turn to page 23: “Forecast: partly opinionated.”
Live-ish indicators
  • Stability Window 12 minutes of calm, then an idea arrives.
  • Co-Creation Pressure High—bring curiosity, not certainty.
  • Design stance Drafts first. “Final” is a sometimes-food.
A game can be wrong and still be interesting. We build systems that surprise us, then we ask them why.
If you want to track the work

We’re a small lab on purpose: two people, fewer meetings, more time with the machine. Follow along on GitHub.

Footer note: “The future is being written.”

Design #818 | Generated in 2m 12s |