Portfolio20112026aka Chubigans

Nick Bryant

Fifteen years across robotics, web and games. I take the projects that look too big to finish, and I finish them alone.

Software engineer · founder · solo game developer

Robotics lab, then NASA. Early engineer on a marketing-automation company that sold twice. Four companies of my own since. Today I build games and the open-source tools they needed, alone.

$250Mcompany exitSharpSpring, where I was an early engineer
50+startups backedas an angel investor
24age at first exitfour companies since
1pair of handsdesign, code, art, audio
01Now

Metatransformer

A one-person game studio and an open-source lab, run together on purpose. The studio ships the games. The lab ships the tools the games needed.

Day to day I orchestrate a fleet of coding agents — fifteen or more at once, across three 20× Max plans. Writing the code stopped being the bottleneck. Scoping, reviewing and landing it is the job now.

Pulled toward
Procedural generationSimulationAlgorithmsRoboticsAI × art × business × code
Working stack
TypeScriptPythonGDScriptC#React / Next.jsThree.jsGodotMongoDBPostgres
02Track record

Fifteen years

Robotics research, a nine-figure software outcome, an agency, a private equity fund, two operator seats, and a game studio. Most recent first.

01

Metatransformer Games

Founder · solo developer

Design, code, art direction, writing, audio and production on three titles in one shared setting. Plus the open-source stack underneath them.

3 titles1 shared world986 atlas entries
The studio hall
02

vn.ai

Cofounder · Head of R&D

Applied research and the product surface it turned into.

vn.ai
03

awarded.ai

Early engineer · interim CTO

First engineering hire, then ran engineering while the company looked for a permanent CTO.

awarded.ai
04

Search Fund Ventures

Cofounder

A lower-middle-market private equity fund. It buys small businesses that hold up in any economy, then rebuilds them around AI, automation and analytics. Conservative structures, margin of safety, operator alignment.

250+ deals reviewed3.9× average purchase multipleFund I closed
searchfundventures.co
05

SMB Investor Network

Cofounder

The co-investment side of the same thesis. Built the product, ran the marketing, and did the investing.

smbinvestornetwork.com
06

Arcanium

Founder · from 2015

A boutique software engineering venture, grown to seven figures. Hard builds for people who had already been told it could not be done.

7-figure agency
07

SharpSpring

Early engineer · from 2011

Marketing automation built to go directly at HubSpot, joined in its formative days. Sold to SMTP Inc for $15M, and again years later for $250M.

$15Mthen $250M
08

NASA · university robotics lab

Robotics · AI research

Robotics lab as an undergrad, then NASA robotics. Undergraduate researcher in common-sense reasoning and classical AI. First place, 2012 senior project: an AI robotic chess set with a crane arm. Headed for an AI PhD, and left for startups instead.

First exit at 24
03Games

What I ship

Three titles in one shared setting. Design, code, art direction, writing, audio and production, by one person.

The Vale of Vallen — painted traversal vista from Valenfeld
In development · Steam wishlist open

Valenfeld

The Lower Worlds I
  • 30 hand-authored dungeons, procedural layouts
  • 3 zones, named bosses, real loot tables
  • Solo with AI-tuned companions, or online co-op
  • Illustrated in-world atlas, 986 entries
  • Windows and macOS

Don’t build a character. Build the party. A co-op dungeon-raiding ARPG where six classes combine as main and subclass, and the run is decided by how four jobs survive the same room.

The Blind Magus spell-select screen
Playable now · free, name your own price

Blind Magus

Shipped
  • Released on itch.io
  • Spell fusion as a readable choice
  • Built and shipped solo

Ikaruga’s polarity, Vampire Survivors’ pressure, and a spell-fusion language you can read at a glance. Finished, released, and free.

In production

Lower Worlds: Awakening

The Lower Worlds II
  • Shared canon with Valenfeld
  • Godot
  • Trailer live

The second title in the shared setting, built on the same lore canon Valenfeld consumes as a submodule.

04Open source

Tools I gave away

Every one of these exists because a project needed it and nothing on the shelf fit. Star counts are live figures, not rounded ones.

05How I work

Terms of engagement

Stated plainly so nobody wastes a call finding out.

01

Hard problems only

I take the ones nobody else can solve and nobody else wants to. Hackers & Painters is the operating philosophy: code as art, shipped.

02

Give me the greenfield

The massive, faintly unreasonable project that changes the game if it lands. I do not do well on maintenance, and I do not pretend otherwise.

03

Whole vertical slices

Design through art through code through release. Stubbed half-features are not evidence of anything.

04

Fleet, not keystrokes

Fifteen-plus agents at once. Orchestration, adversarial review, and landing the work are where the leverage is now.

06Built in the browser

Three exhibits

Real-time WebGL, running on this domain. The same content as the page you are reading, presented as a place you can walk through.

Recruiting

The traditional way

I don’t fill in job applications. If you have the project that is too big, write to me directly.

nick@metatransformer.com