Marcin 'HCK' Firmuga
Marcin "HCK" Firmuga
Most game-dev profiles start with the first game they loved.
Mine starts in a warehouse in the Netherlands.
For nine months I walked about 15 km a shift scanning barcodes. At night I coded on a 2014 laptop that liked 94°C. I lost that job on December 22nd.
That night I started rebuild #4 of a Windows project I still refused to kill.
Three weeks later: first .exe.
A year later: Microsoft Store
I didn't become a studio in between. I just kept shipping.
Now: Scaling Laws
January 2022. $12M. No product. The AI frontier is already moving.
Scaling Laws is first game I'm building under HCK Labs, an AI company tycoon where you
train models, fund research, rent or own compute, time hardware generations, raise capital and race rival labs.
A shiny new GPU can be a terrible purchase six weeks before the next generation.
A finished model can sit on the shelf while you wait for a better release window.
Your intelligence report can sound 80% certain and still be wrong.
That's the kind of tycoon I wanted to play, so I'm building it.
-> Game site
-> Public roadmap
-> How the simulation works
Before the game: PC Workman
PC Workman is project that taught me how much work "solo" actually means.
Four rebuilds. 1120+ commits · ~2000 downloads. Now on the Microsoft Store.
It's a Windows system monitor that tries to answer why your PC is slow instead of dumping forty numbers on screen. Its local hck_GPT assistant works offline, and the monitoring engine learns the machine's own thermal baseline over time.
Somewhere during that year I also finished Skills of Tomorrow 3.0 - Google cert programme, and kept writing the failures down instead of hiding them.
What I do here
I build in public.
Not "big things coming". Actual screenshots, broken builds, architecture decisions, ugly first versions and the part where I delete three days of work because the second attempt is better.
My weekly rhythm has three names:
Monday Grind Blueprint - what I'm trying to build.
Wednesday Code Autopsy - one technical problem opened up.
Friday Shipped & Scarred - what actually shipped, and what absolutely did not.
If something on this itch.io page says playable, I want that word to mean playable.
Warehouse -> Microsoft Store -> now building an AI lab tycoon.
Let's see where this one goes.
