The Forger

The Vision

I have wanted to build a video game for as long as I can remember. About twenty years ago, I worked for a game company as a proofreader — making sure every line of dialogue and every UI string was grammatically correct before it shipped. I also worked for a render farm, where I got to help bring other people's creative visions to life. I went to college for computer graphics. I was always close to the craft, but never quite at the center of it.

The Barrow's Den is my answer to that. It is the studio I built so I could finally create the game I always wanted to play — a dark fantasy ARPG with deep systems, rich lore, and a world that challenges you to think. That game is Ashenmark.

But this isn't just a passion project. This is my family's future.

The Road Behind Me

In 2019, I was in a serious motorcycle accident. I survived, but it left me with lasting damage — both physical and cognitive. The cervical injuries cause chronic pain that makes holding down a conventional job a daily battle. But the harder part to explain is what the accident did to my mind.

My memory doesn't work the way it used to. I struggle with speech — words that used to come easily now take real effort to find. I can't think as quickly as I once could. Small problems that would have taken me minutes to solve before the accident now sometimes take hours, and the frustration that comes with that is something I deal with every single day. I get frustrated on things that should be simple. I know they should be simple. That's what makes it so hard.

Since the accident, I've struggled to work. The pain kicks in. The cognitive issues make my job difficult. Some days are better than others. But the consistency that employers need — the reliability that a paycheck demands — is something my body and my brain can no longer always guarantee.

It would have been easy to walk away from game development entirely. But the dream didn't go away with the accident — it just became harder to reach. So I adapted. I found new ways to work. I take things one system at a time, one feature at a time, one line of code at a time.

The People Behind the Forge

My wife Sheena lives with a broken back. She deals with chronic pain every day, and she can't work because of it. She is the strongest person I know. We support each other through things that most people never have to think about. When my memory fails or my frustration peaks, she's there. When her pain is at its worst, I'm there.

My mother has multiple sclerosis and struggles with everyday tasks. My step-father has COPD and faces his own daily battles. This is my family. These are the people I'm trying to provide for.

We struggle. We struggle to eat. We struggle to pay bills. We struggle to feed our animals. We struggle to find gas money to get to physical therapy appointments, to doctors visits. I hate that I can't provide for my family right now. And I've been so close to giving up so many times over the last few years.

We don't share this for sympathy. We share it because it's the truth of where this game comes from. Ashenmark is not being built from a comfortable office with a team and a budget. It's being built from a household where both of us are fighting just to get through the day — and choosing to build something meaningful anyway. If this game does well, it means my family has a future. That's what this is for.

The Tools That Level the Field

I want to be transparent about something: AI is part of my workflow. Not because I'm cutting corners — but because my brain doesn't work the way it used to, and AI helps fill the gaps that the accident left behind.

When I can't remember the right syntax, I ask. When I need clarification on a design pattern, I look it up. When I get stuck on a problem for hours because my thinking is slower than it used to be, I use AI as a sounding board to help me work through it. It's a tool — no different from the Unity engine, or Visual Studio, or a search engine. It doesn't write my game for me. It helps me build the game I already have in my head.

It hasn't been a smooth journey. I've had struggles — data being overwritten, files saved in wrong places because I gave unclear instructions. I've lost work and had to redo things from scratch. Me forgetting things and having to rely on an AI's memory to recall what I was working on — that pains me. But because of these tools, I'm able to keep building. I'm able to hopefully bring my dream to fruition. And that matters more than pride.

Before I discovered AI-assisted development, I was running out of hope. I could see the game in my head but I couldn't get it out fast enough, couldn't hold enough of the architecture in my memory at once. When I found tools that could help bridge that gap, I started to believe again. The road has been hard. But I'm still on it.