Guardrails.exe
A tower defense roguelike about delaying the rise of AGI. Made with AI, about AI, and balanced by AI. The whole thing is AI.
What hooked me
I wanted to make a game about AI, so naturally I used AI to make it. Then I used AI to test it and balance it too. At some point the joke became the method.
What I built
A tower defense roguelike where your job is to hold off the rise of AGI for as long as you can. It has:
- a tower system for building your defences
- an elaborate skill tree
- a wild bestiary of everything that comes at you
- achievements, obviously
I first built it in Godot, then used AI to port the whole thing to the web so it runs in the browser.
The robots testing the robots
Balancing a roguelike takes a lot of runs. I worked with an MCP server, Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.4 to generate thousands of simulations. Some were for balancing. Others tested how well AI agents can control desktop applications, which meant agents playing a game about stopping AI.
An AI playing a game about stopping AI, to help me balance it. I'm choosing not to think about that too hard.
What I learned
I was going to monetise it. Then I realised that would mean supporting it, and that's not how ADHD works. So it's free, it's finished (for now), and it's here.