Building Space MUD: A Text Game About Robots on a Space Station
The premise is simple: you wake up on a broken space station. You don’t remember anything. You start exploring, picking up items, talking to other units, repairing systems. And at some point it clicks — you’re not a person. You’re a robot. The whole game uses mechanical language from the start. Your health is “integrity.” You don’t sleep, you go idle. When you die, it’s an “emergency reboot.” The station doesn’t call you a crew member. It calls you a unit.
Hosting a MUD on AWS for $10/Month
A MUD needs to be online 24/7. Players log in at weird hours. The server has to just be there, quietly running, handling connections from whoever shows up. I didn’t want to babysit it. I wanted to set it up once and forget about it.
Here’s how I got Space MUD running on AWS for roughly $10/month — and what I’d do differently next time.
The Setup
The game runs on Evennia, a Python MUD framework that gives you a telnet server and a web client out of the box. It uses Django under the hood, stores everything in SQLite by default, and daemonizes itself so it keeps running after you close your SSH session. For a small MUD, it’s the right tool.
Kiro Steering Docs vs Skills — When to Use Which
I just spent the evening setting up my blog’s deployment workflow in Kiro, and at the end I had a choice: do I save this as a steering doc or a skill? They both let you give Kiro persistent context, but they work differently and solve different problems.
Here’s how I think about it after going through the decision myself.
What steering docs do
A steering doc is a markdown file that lives in
.kiro/steering/. It’s essentially a note you leave for future Kiro conversations: “here’s how this project works, here’s what to keep in mind.”How I Put This Blog on the Internet with AWS
When I built this blog, getting it running on my own computer was the easy part. Run one command, open a browser, done. The part that felt like a mountain was the next question: how do you take a folder of files on your laptop and turn it into a real website that anyone in the world can visit?
This post is the walkthrough I wish I’d had. No prior cloud experience needed. If you already know your way around DNS and S3, you can skim the steps and grab the Namecheap-specific gotchas. If you’re newer, I’ve linked out to deeper explainers at each tricky part so you can actually understand what you’re doing, not just copy commands. That’s the whole spirit of this blog: do it yourself, and learn how it works while you’re at it.
Hello World — First Post on imadestuff
Welcome to imadestuff
This is the first post on imadestuff.com — a place where I document the things I build, break, and learn along the way.
To kick things off, here’s the classic “Hello World” of electronics: a blinking LED on an Arduino.
The Circuit
Wire up an LED to pin 13 on your Arduino Uno with a 220Ω resistor. That’s it. Simple as it gets.
