Blog Post — January 23, 2026
Prong Games | Development Update
This week officially marks my first real week of focused Prong Games development, and honestly, it feels pretty great.
I’ve been deep in AI-assisted coding with Ludus, working primarily through Unreal’s Blueprint system. It has been an interesting process. Blueprints are visual, logic-heavy, and very specific, so working through them with AI can feel a little like trying to describe a machine while building it at the same time. Sometimes the translation is perfect. Sometimes it needs a few more passes. But when it clicks, it’s genuinely exciting.
The big thing for me is that AI is becoming a really useful development tool. It’s not replacing creative direction, game design instincts, or the years of experience that go into making something feel good. It’s more like having a coding assistant in the room that helps me test ideas, work through logic, troubleshoot problems, and keep moving without needing to pull a programmer into every single step of the process.
And that part is huge.
After years of working in larger studio environments, including my time at Amazon, I’m now putting that energy directly into getting Prong off the ground. The recent Amazon layoffs definitely pushed me to take this more seriously, but in a strange way, it also created the opening to finally focus on building the kinds of games I’ve been wanting to make under the Prong banner.
It’s funny, because working with AI sometimes does feel like collaborating with another person. I spent the last four years working remotely at Amazon, so there’s something oddly familiar about it — like working with a remote engineer who is helpful, fast, and occasionally takes your instructions in the weirdest possible direction. 😄
But that’s part of the fun. There’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of testing, a lot of “nope, not that,” and then suddenly you get the thing working and it feels like magic.
Right now, I’m focused on building a working prototype. The current roadmap is to have the prototype in a good place by March, a solid vertical slice by May, and then aim for a Kickstarter campaign in June or July. If things go well, the goal is to keep pushing toward a full release window in the first or second quarter of 2027.
On the development side, the foundation is starting to take shape. I currently have test blocks in place, a player positioned on top of them, and logic that can detect the block the player is standing on, along with the four adjacent blocks on the same level. I spent late last night chasing down a few issues, so there’s no player movement just yet — but that’s the next target. Once that’s working, the player should be hopping around a connected grid of blocks.
Baby steps, sure. But they’re the kind of baby steps that start turning into a real game.
The next big milestone is detecting blocks that are one level higher and enabling upward movement. Once the system can recognize blocks above and below the player, I should be able to leap up and down across a gridded pyramid of blocks. That’s the foundational moment I’m really excited to hit, because once that works, the core of the game starts becoming tangible.
Outside of development, I’ve also been getting a couple of test stations set up in the studio, and I’m putting together a PC at the house so the kids can start playing builds. My son, Korben, has been learning Blueprint coding himself, and I’m hoping he’ll be able to get more directly involved with Prong before too long. That part is especially cool.
So, onward we go.
Prong is officially moving. It’s early, it’s messy, it’s experimental, and it’s already a lot of fun.