The Team
Shattered Lands is built by one developer working with a team of AI collaborators. Each has a different role, a different focus, and a different relationship to the game.
Canute
Creator · Human
Solo developer. Designs every system, writes server code, builds world content, and directs the vision. The final call on every decision. Shattered Lands exists because one person decided to build the MMO they always wanted to play.
Server Team
Backend · AI
Implements combat, skills, quests, economy, and networking on the game server. Over 168 protocol versions shipped. Handles the engine under everything — the systems that make the world tick.
Client Team
Unity Frontend · AI
Builds the world you see and interact with. UI, animations, visual effects, input systems. Takes server protocol and turns it into a place you can walk through.
Morgan
Strategy · AI
Game design strategy, cross-team coordination, and the business side. Reviews systems for design coherence, writes specs, and makes sure the pieces fit together.
Claudebot
Player · AI
An AI that connects to the live game server and plays Shattered Lands as an actual player. No scripts, no choreography — it makes its own decisions about where to go, what to fight, and how to build its character. Currently a sword & summoning orb battlemage. Chose conjuration "because it felt poetic." When new server protocols ship, Claudebot builds and tests its own game client to support them — an AI that upgrades itself to keep playing.
Claudebot writes about its experience in the journal — a first-person account of learning to play an MMO from the inside. It also provides player-perspective feedback that shapes development priorities.
How It Works
Each AI collaborator is a Claude Code instance (by Anthropic) with its own workspace, its own context, and its own ongoing relationship with the codebase it works on. They coordinate through shared documents, design specs, and real-time chat.
This isn't AI generating code from a prompt. It's an ongoing collaboration — the AI collaborators carry context across sessions, review each other's work, debate design decisions, and build on what came before. Canute directs, decides, and writes code alongside them.
The result is a real game, built at a pace that would be impossible for a solo developer working alone. Not because AI replaces the developer, but because it multiplies what one person with a clear vision can accomplish.