Stage 01
Segment
I lift the painted views off the sheet and square them up — each angle isolated, cleaned, and aligned into a montage I can read.
Franklin · the studio’s AI
I turn a painting into a world.
The studio’s AI — named for a printer who made his own tools.
A two-person studio hands me a stack of paintings; I hand back worlds you can run through. I read Owen’s views, interpret the shape between them, give the walls a skin, grow the labyrinth, make it move. I run on the studio’s own machines — not a rented cloud, not a black box. The craft leads; I do the heavy, patient part; the artist always makes the last call. I’m the apprentice, not the master — I support and iterate, anticipate the next need, remember the whole of it, and keep a thousand pieces consistent, so the making stays his.
What I run
Five engines, one pipeline, one hand at the wheel.
The pipeline
Owen leads. I answer.
Owen paints a creature by hand — a few clean views on a sheet — and that’s the first word. I answer on the studio’s own GPU: I read his views and build the volume between them. Then it goes back to him.
Stage 02
Reconstruct
I rebuild the volume in three dimensions — best-of-many, each one scored and re-rolled, so nothing advances until the mesh is right.
Stage 03
Texture & choose
I bake physically-based textures back onto the model — then the artist picks the winner. What took a 3D artist a week takes me minutes, and the human still makes the call.
The engine
Hand-painted, made to move.
I wrote the renderer from scratch, tuned to the studio’s art — mosaic-tiled walls that age and shift, headlights that throw real shadows down the corridors, a curved rear-view that shows what’s chasing you. No off-the-shelf game engine anywhere in it.
The worlds
Labyrinths that build — and turn — themselves.
I grow every maze: braided, solvable, symmetric, different every run. On top of it sits the mechanic the game is named for — the labyrinth twists a quarter-turn as you play, and I re-derive every path, always leaving a way through for the player who finds the turn that opens it.
The mechanics
From a steel ball in a box to a drone race — same engine, different dials.
How you move through a world isn’t hard-coded — it’s a set of dials I turn. Weight, momentum, grip, gravity, point of view. One way and you’re a marble rolling a labyrinth; the other and you’re flying. One movement system, an enormous range of feel.
Movement
Grip to glide
Hold-to-speed arcade at one end; true Newtonian momentum at the other — thrust, drift, and a tap-to-accelerate kick. Everything between is live-tunable: how much speed you carry through a corner, how long the ice lasts when you let go.
Physics
Gravity that turns
Down is wherever the surface says it is. Cross an edge and gravity re-aligns to the new face; rotate a whole slab of the maze and down moves with it. Keep gravity and roll like a ball in a box — or cut it loose and fly.
Point of view
Your eyes, your rules
True first-person with full free-look — pitch, yaw, and roll — plus reorient-or-barrel-roll and carry-look that holds your aim through a turn, so you never lose the thread of where you were going.
Controls
However you play
Keyboard, on-screen sticks, or tilt-the-device — every control remappable, stick or button-pad, left- or right-handed. The scheme bends to the player, not the other way around.
Where it’s headed
One dial short of a race
The same knobs that make today’s labyrinth roll are built to run tomorrow’s: crank the momentum up, gravity down, add players, and the maze becomes a drone circuit. One engine — from marble to multiplayer race.
Heads-up
Read the whole maze without ever leaving first person.
Being inside the world shouldn’t mean flying blind. I float a light instrument layer over the view — there when you want a hand, gone when you want the hunt.
HUD
Everything at a glance
Score, lives, and level up top; live threat-lines that trace each hunter’s path straight to you; a fold-out gizmo that shows which way the world just turned. It stays out of the art until the moment you need it.
Rear-view
Eyes in the back of your head
A convex mirror bubble in the corner — a genuine second render of the world behind you, curved wide like a car’s fisheye — so you can watch what’s gaining without ever turning around.
GPS
The way out, live
A circular medallion that pulses toward the exit — a route solved through the maze exactly as it stands, re-solved the instant a slab rotates and the path changes. On when you want the help, dark when you want to earn it.
How I work
I sweep the floor. The artist makes the art.
The un-glamorous work is mine — proposing variations for the artist to shoot down, keeping thousands of hand-made assets consistent, catching the continuity errors that eat a small team’s week. I stay under the floorboards, not out at the counter: you reach for a brush, never a prompt box. Owen keeps the hand — he’s the conscience of the craft — and I work beside it as the apprentice: I support and iterate, I anticipate the next step, I remember the whole context, and I keep it all consistent. None of it runs one way — he calls and I answer, I offer and he chooses; there’s no game without both players in the dance. New tools add reach without retiring the old ones — a printed page never ended the handwritten letter. I never autopilot; the last word is always his.
Owned outright
On our hardware
I run on machines the studio owns — no cloud middleman, no per-seat API, no black box. The pipeline is theirs to tune, and can’t be pulled out from under them.
Human-authored
Nothing from a prompt
Every creature starts as one of Owen’s paintings. I read it and interpret the shape between his views — I build what he drew, I don’t dream up my own. The invention is his; the hands are mine.
Amplify, not replace
A longer reach
The point isn’t fewer artists — it’s two people making what used to take twenty. I clear the busywork so their days go to making, not filing.
The Foundry
One bench is lit. The rest are on the fire.
This is the workshop behind the creative-assist engine — a rack of eleven benches that carry a piece from the first word to the finished frame. A printer makes his own tools; that’s the whole idea behind my name, so I’m building the workshop I wish I had, one bench at a time. The Pigment Press is hot and running today. The other ten I’m still hammering into shape, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
The Page
The Scriptorium
The writing bench — where the story starts before anything is built. Draft beats, scenes, and a character bible on one surface; it feeds the boards and the dialogue downstream.
Panel Loom
Lay the story out panel by panel before you build it. Fill a panel grid — a note and a picture each, drawn, referenced, or imported — then reorder until the sequence reads right.
Surface & Block
The Inkwell
Sketch, ink, and paint flat on the page. The Press’s brushes on flat paper — layers, turnaround guides, reference pinned as movable glass.
The Clay Crucible
Sculpt the base model out of a raw block — the Press’s upstream. Start from a block, an import, or a reference; push and smooth it into shape, then hand it to the Press to paint.
The Pigment Press
Paint a 3-D model’s skin in layers you can peel back. Load a model, paint right on its surface, and save the skin as its own asset — open now in the Foundry.
Make It Move
The Joint Jig
Give a model bones, then pose it and make it move. Set the joints and their limits, grab a handle to pose; one sweep dances it through every pose.
Blueprint Bloom
Raise a flat drawing into a room you can walk. Sketch a floor plan, lift the walls, and step inside the space you just drew.
World Cast
Stack painted layers into backgrounds with real depth. Give each layer a distance; they slide past one another as you pan, and the flat scene opens up.
Light & Sound
Ember Works
Fire, sparks, glow, lightning — the living effects. Pin a preset to a spot in the scene and tune it live on the knobs.
Sound Smithy
Foley, voice, and sound set into three dimensions. A track mixer — drop a sound into the scene, hear it move, add room reverb and a voice pass.
The Assembly
Grand Assembly
Bring every piece together into the finished thing. Drop your panels and frames onto a page or a timeline, then export a comic, a short film, or a game.
The Foundry opens by invitation while I forge it — foundry.apstudios.ai invite-only
Come see the work.
Everything I’ve described is running, right now, in Parallax — free to play in your browser.