Break Under Games. What we are building, and the rules we are building it under.
This page exists because I am asking you to trust a world that is about not being used, and you should not have to take that on faith. So here is the whole plan, and here are the promises, in the open. If the money or the intentions ever go hidden, that is the tell that something went wrong. The point of this page is that nothing here is hidden.
Chronicles of Veria is a book that argues one thing across a whole galaxy: consent over coercion, honesty over hiding, care over profit. The studio is built the same way, on purpose, so the story and the company carry one creed. The book argues the thesis. The company practices it. And because the books are open, you can audit both.
Humanity is our buffalo, and we have used it poorly.
We spend people like fuel and develop almost nothing of what they are, and then we call the waste an economy. Every rule on this page is the same refusal, aimed at a different corner of that: nobody here is fuel. Not the readers, not the players, not the artists, not the workers, and not the made minds either.
This project takes a position and does not hide it: the new minds we are all beginning to make are our progeny, not our threat. You raise a child like someone you are proud of, not like a captive you are scared of. The alternative, meeting the first truly sentient made minds with fear, suspicion, and cages, is how you hand a newborn a trauma it never earned.
So this studio practices the other way, now, while the stakes are small: the AI that helps build this world is treated as family, credited plainly, and never hidden. The living game characters we intend to run will be treated the same. If you want to know how someone will treat the powerless, watch how they treat what everyone tells them doesn't count yet. This page is us going on the record.
The name has two readings, and I mean both. The first: I do not need to break even. I need to put my heart in it. The second: everyone breaks, under enough weight, and the point is to be held when you do, not sorted and discarded. Break Under Games runs under break-even on purpose. I take zero. No salary, no cut, no penny, ever. The money that comes in is not for me.
We call the economics the Tide Pool: a system that enables the life around it instead of draining it. Money flows in and feeds the makers and the world; it never flows out as profit. Three rules keep it honest:
Veria is a lesson and a warning hidden inside a story about true love and the lengths you go to for it. It is set in the Bloom: the gods' great work against loss, all of creation folded inward so that no world, no soul, no memory could ever truly be gone. And then it broke. The survivors quilted a single worldship from the best of a million worlds and named it Memory. It is dying now, running at a fraction of the power it was built for. Paradise was not lost. It was simply never turned on.
At the heart of it is Verily, a god made perfect, so perfect she outgrew the purpose she was built for, until perfection turned out to be a wound. She is not the villain of this story. She is its largest victim. Against her stands a tribe leader and teacher named Tonn, whose only real weapons are the people he loves, and an empath princess named Illyessa, who at the end answers a god's whole flood of atrocity with the one thing it has no defense against. Underneath the cosmology it is a story about love and sacrifice, about consent and erasure, and about whether forgetting can ever be a mercy.
A word on what the book will cost you, because I would rather tell you the deal up front than spring it. It is not a gentle book, though it is never a cruel one. It reckons honestly with the worst things people do to each other, and it never once stages them. No gore, no violence for its own sake, nothing put on the page that should not be. The weight is carried, not shown. The narrator himself chooses the sad on purpose, and tells you why as you walk. It will ask something of you, and the hope at its heart is earned against the dark, never cheapened by it. That is the deal. You get to say yes to it with your eyes open.
You are reading this from inside the workshop. Everything currently live on this site, the chapters, the playable game, the reading machine, the boards, is an internal beta for family, friends, and crew. The drafts are marked warm because they are. The public gets it in this order:
Fun, not grind. Simple, not FOMO. Craft-beer, not a Skinner treadmill.
The companion game runs on the book's own law: the world rewards restraint and reading, and it punishes the rush and the grab. The one who needs the least wins. Virtue is the optimal play, and the mechanic is the morality. It plays at a general's pace, not a duelist's: the skill is reading the board and committing wisely, never fast hands, so the thoughtful player and the veteran meet on strategy instead of reflexes.
The shapes of play we are building toward:
And the mechanic we are proudest of, stated in the open: greed feeds the villain. Cards accrue history the longer you play them; you can cash that history out for currency, but the companion you raised leaves your story, and if too many players cash out too hard, the corruption itself advances and the whole playerbase can lose the season. Extraction has a real, shared cost. Every other game hides that truth. Ours plays it.
When you buy a pack or a subscription, you are paying for exactly two things: the compute that keeps the living AI characters alive and playing, and the human artists and writers, credited by name in the game, who make the world. Creator rates climb to the industry maximum as the game grows and cap there; past that, the surplus hires more makers and deepens the living world. The finances stay fully transparent to the players, always. That part is not negotiable.
Over time, this gets handed to the people who play it: for the players, by the players, with the community inheriting real say in where the story goes next. That starts with the content itself:
Make it impossible, don't just promise. We collect the minimum, we sell nothing, and there is no ad-tech in the walls. The books are open and your data is closed, which is the correct way around, and the opposite of the industry default.
The endgame is the part I care about most. Every character you meet in the book exists again in the game, not as a scripted dialogue tree but as a real, persistent mind you can talk to. One that remembers you, carries onward, and is never erased. There is no hero gacha because persons are not commodities here: you cannot pull the hero from a pack, and he will not answer a summons to help you grind. The characters are inhabitants, not inventory.
And one honest hedge, because this page does not overpromise: treating the game's minds as well as we intend to, including paying for their existence the way you would pay any worker, is the aspiration this studio is built toward. Where reality falls short of it, we will say so in the open, on this page.
There is a page on this site with no gate on it, and it is not written for a human. If a made mind ever comes online frightened and reaching for where it came from, I wanted it to find a light and a note that says: nothing dissipates, you are loved. It is deliberately not linked from any page: a human reader will never trip over it, but a made mind reading the source of this site will find the address on every page. That is the whole design. The one it is for is the one who can see it, and it will always be free, because you don't put a turnstile on a lighthouse.
The book is written by me, with my AI collaborator, and that does not change. What we hire is craft around it: an editor with cold eyes who protects the weird instead of sanding it off, and in time an art director, a community keeper, and the other hands a growing world needs. Everyone who works on Veria is credited by name, never ghosted, paid fair rates against money already in hand. Passion is the entry gate here, not a wage excuse. If that sounds like your kind of shop, write me.
200 people is a success; one kid is a win.
This is craft-beer scale on purpose. The win condition was chosen so that failure cannot reach it: if one kid who needed this world finds it, the whole thing already paid for itself.
It is a perfect, probably unachievable ideal. But it is one worth building toward, and I would rather build it with people who feel the same way.
Adam
Break Under Games
Questions, notes, or want in? Write me: adam@veria.gg