Overlord Engine: The Game Engine for Web Development
Here's a designer working in the Decima game engine, the powerhouse behind some of the world's most advanced video games (short clip, audio makes it better):
Watch what happens in these few seconds. The designer is playing the game, instantly switches to edit mode, bulk removes and places trees with perfect logic (avoiding roads, creating natural patterns), sculpts terrain to match their vision, drops in rocks and enemies on the freshly modified landscape, then immediately jumps back into play mode to test everything. A complete workflow in seconds, creativity with almost no friction.
When you think about it for a moment, you realize that it's astonishing. This is someone manipulating an extremely complex piece of software (the game) in different ways, interactively. This is software being created with the immediacy and interactivity that someone turns clay into a pot.
Now here is a simple question: Why is web dev, the development of backends and websites and mobile apps, so rigid and inaccessible in comparison?
Let's do an exercise: try to change a flow, like the onboarding flow, in your app. Add a page, re-order the flow and change the rules a bit, very mundane things. How long on average is that going to take you? What's the development experience like? How easy is it to experiment and iterate?
It is surprising that, even for the most common things, like implementing a simple onboarding flow for an app (glorified form filling), the web dev world has no tooling that even approaches the smooth, fast, and malleable experience we saw in the video, and that's for onboarding. The further you get from basics, the worse the situation gets.
You don't work with images by pixels, nor with the internet by packets, and you definitely don't program by writing 0s and 1s. We use Photoshop, text editors, browsers, game engines, programming languages, and more because these tools allow us to work at the natural conceptual level for the problems they are tackling. They allow us to work semantically.
In a paint program, semantic work means you don't think of pixels and RGB, you think of colors, brushes, and layers. Not only do you 'think' using concepts like colors and brushes, but you operate using those concepts. The software provides a semantic interface so powerful and natural that a child can use it!
Web development lacks the semantic concepts and tooling that other fields take for granted. We don't work at the natural conceptual level of our problems, like user flows and service dependencies. Instead, we are stuck manipulating low-level implementation details across fragmented tools and codebases.
What if we had a "game engine for web development", a unified environment where you could design, modify, and test complete user experiences across backend, frontend, mobile, and infrastructure with the same fluidity as that game designer sculpting terrain?
We are building Overlord Engine, the first development environment designed from the ground up for the entire web application lifecycle. Unlike today's fragmented toolchain of separate frontend frameworks, backend services, mobile SDKs, and deployment platforms, Overlord Engine unifies these domains into a single semantic workspace.
This unification unlocks entirely new categories of tooling that were impossible before. Imagine modifying user permissions and instantly seeing how it affects the frontend UI, backend validation, and mobile app behavior simultaneously. Or debugging a payment flow by stepping through the entire user journey from frontend form to database transaction to third-party API call in one seamless view. When the boundaries between domains dissolve, we can finally build tools that work at the speed of thought, turning every developer into a true fullstack engineer.
The semantic approach also unleashes AI in ways that are impossible today. Current AI gets buried under mountains of irrelevant code, file navigation, and syntax noise across different tech stacks. Overlord Engine gives AI direct access to semantic operations: create user authentication flow, modify payment processing across all platforms, restructure database relationships with frontend updates. AI isn't parsing your codebase anymore, it's wielding the same conceptual tools you are. This is AI operating at near-100% signal, zero noise.
We are in the early stages of building Overlord Engine. If you're a developer frustrated with today's subpar development experience, an investor interested in the future of software development, or simply someone who believes development should be as fluid as the game engine demo we opened with, we would love to connect at [email protected].
If you want to stay updated (and know when our beta goes live!), signup for our newsletter: