A satirical mobile gacha RPG about the people who keep the servers running. Built by someone who's worked the on-call rotation.
Most gacha games are fantasy — knights, mages, dragons. hero-proto is set in the modern corporate IT department: helpdesk veterans, predatory consultants, retired mainframe gurus, the occasional rogue DBA. The combat is turn-based. The economy is honest. The monetization is cosmetics + QoL — we explicitly don't sell power.
For the curious: FastAPI + SQLAlchemy + Alembic on Python 3.13. SQLite for dev, Postgres in prod (CI runs both). Redis-backed rate limiter for horizontal scale. Sentry for errors, Prometheus for metrics, JSON logs with request IDs. JWT auth with refresh-token rotation, TOTP 2FA, password reset, email verification — all the boring-but-essential stuff is done. Frontend is HTMX + Jinja with a Phaser battle replayer. PWA via service worker. Mobile via Capacitor (planned).
Source on GitHub. PRs welcome from anyone who's been on a 3 AM page.
Phase 1 ("First 10 minutes feel good") shipped. Phase 2 is hero detail depth, PostHog analytics, IAP receipt verification, and a story campaign. Phase 3 is combat-control depth (player target selection, mana/focus resource, hail-mary at low HP) plus animated battle actors via Rive. Phase 4 is Capacitor wrap and store submission. See the changelog for what's already done.
It's a near-future corporate dystopia running on legacy infrastructure, held together by exhausted IT workers, compliance officers who read policies aloud as incantations, and a C-suite that learned "AI" from a Gartner keynote. The Corp is abstract at first — an unseen owner who schedules pager rotations, signs access-policy updates, and measures performance in ticket-closure velocity. As the player progresses, fragments reveal a centralized, self-perpetuating machine. Every faction has its reasons for existing inside it.
At account level 50, players hit the alignment fork: Corporate Resistance (take down the Corp) or Board Ascendant (become the Corp). Until they choose they remain in Exile — neither side trusts them yet. Both alignments lead to dedicated epic chapters, cosmetic palettes, and one exclusive hero. Mechanically equal. Flavor different.
One developer, evenings and weekends. Not affiliated with any of the companies whose tools, processes, or pager rotations inspired the satire. If you recognize yourself in The Founder, that's between you and your therapist.