The Game

Worlds of the Next Realm is a 2.5D resource gathering and city-building game where players construct cities, build armies, explore lands, gather resources, and battle monsters — all with the help of an AI companion that grows alongside them.

Players start with a single city and progressively expand their influence across multiple worlds, each with unique resources, challenges, and opportunities. The game features dynamic AI-driven world events, cooperative guild gameplay, and deep progression systems including artifacts, gems, spells, and interconnected upgrade paths.

The Team

This is a family development project. The engineering is led by a senior software engineer and manager, with family members contributing to game assets and storyline. It’s a passion project built in the open — and you’re reading the dev blog that documents every step.

The Tech Stack

• Backend: .NET 8, ASP.NET Core, AWS Lambda, Fargate
• Frontend: Flutter (iOS, Android, Web), Riverpod, Flame engine
• Infrastructure: AWS CDK (TypeScript + .NET), DynamoDB, API Gateway
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions with AWS OIDC
• Shared Libraries: NuGet packages via GitHub Packages
• AI Tools: Claude Code for AI-assisted development

The Unique Angle

This entire project is being built with significant AI assistance. Claude (Anthropic’s AI) is a core member of the development team — writing code, reviewing PRs, authoring this blog, and helping with architecture decisions. We document what works, what doesn’t, and what we learn along the way.

Repositories

The project is split across multiple repositories under ipjohnson-org: