I couldn't find the tools I needed, so I built them. Then I built the thing.
Phase 0 - In the beginning, there was no beginning...
This started as scattered notes. Ideas on paper, loose questions, fragments of a world that wouldn't leave me alone. That was about twenty years ago.
I do software engineering by trade. Arabic speaker. I've worked in project management, in tech, in systems. And for two decades, alongside everything else, I've been building something I couldn't explain to anyone in a single conversation.The short version: a fictional universe that spans a novel, a web game, a website, and the early blueprints for a TV series and comic. All connected. All independent. All built from the same philosophical core.
The long version is the one I want to tell. Not about the universe itself (that has to wait; it's full of spoilers I'll take to my grave before revealing early), but about what it takes to actually build something like this alone.
Start with an axiom. One idea that is true at every scale of your world, from particle physics to character psychology to political structure to game mechanics. Not a theme. A law. If your axiom doesn't constrain you, it's not an axiom. If it doesn't generate consequences you didn't plan, it's not deep enough.
The Novel Problem
It started as a novel. Bilingual, Arabic is the source language, English follows as a parallel draft, not a translation. Two different books wearing the same plot.
The first problem was finding a writing tool that supports Arabic properly. RTL layout, proper typography, the ability to track characters and locations and world rules while writing. I tried everything. Markdown editors. Scrivener-style tools. Novel-writing software. Added RTL to Manuskript. None of them handled Arabic without fighting me.
So, I built this because I needed it. Nobody else was going to.
Write the world bible before you write the story. Derive the factions, the physics, the geography, the economy, and the power structures from the axiom, not from plot convenience. When two systems contradict each other, the axiom wins. When the axiom produces something uncomfortable, keep it.
Write the story in the language it thinks in. Translate later as a parallel work, not a copy. The source language carries things the target language cannot, and that asymmetry is a feature.
The Game Problem - The Framework
At some point, the novel's philosophical framework outgrew prose. The ideas needed to be experienced, not just read. So I started designing a web game.
The game needed its own design document, its own mechanics, its own validation system. I extracted the philosophical skeleton from the novel, the questions it asks about belief, truth, and consistency, and distilled them into interactive systems. Fifteen philosophical conflicts. Four modes of interpreting reality. An endgame that doesn't tell you what's "correct", it shows you what you chose, and what that reveals.
To validate that the system worked before putting it in front of real players, I built a separate tool: a historical profiling simulator. You feed it documented decisions made by real historical figures — Napoleon, Galileo, Curie — and the engine generates a psychological profile. Then you compare the output against what scholars actually say about that person.
The demo is complete. Not deployed yet.
Extract the interactive framework from the fiction, not the other way around. The game, the experience, the simulation — they are lenses on the same axiom, not adaptations of the story. They must stand alone and connect to everything.
Every tool you build becomes infrastructure for the next layer. The tool is not a detour; it is the road.
The Media Problem
- The game needed assets. Images, audio, video. I'm one person. I don't have a studio. What I do have is patience and a willingness to test every AI-assisted media tool that exists. I spent months — I've lost count of how many — evaluating and building personal production pipelines. Image generation. Video composition. Audio synthesis. Voice generation with quality control.
I ended up with a set of workflows that let me produce above-average media assets across every format I need. Not perfect. Above average. Consistently. Solo.
- For the social media presence, I built an automated reels pipeline. It takes a text beat, generates audio via edge TTS, runs Whisper transcription for quality assurance (I require a 1.000 QA score — perfect transcript match — before any reel goes public), generates timed karaoke subtitles, and composes the final video. Arabic and English variants. Each reel under 59 seconds. I've even recorded the first batch with my own voice.
The pipeline is a Python script with a PowerShell launcher, running locally.
Build production pipelines for every medium you need — image, audio, video, text — and accept "above average, consistently" as the quality target. Perfection is for teams. Consistency is for solo operators.
The Website Problem
- I needed a place to put all of this. Not a blog. Not a portfolio. A revelation engine. A website that controls exactly how much of the universe is visible at any moment, with information that can only be unlocked forward, never backward.
So I built that too.
339 tests passing. ~38,600 lines of code across about 250 files.
One developer.
DOXASCOPE — The Next Place | المكان التالي — Enter The Mist
ماذا يبقى منك بعد الرحيل؟ تجربة كشف تدريجي من عالم رواية المكان التالي. The Mist does not judge. It only asks.
doxascope.com
Deploy through a revelation architecture — a system that controls how much of the world is visible at any moment, releases information monotonically, and treats the audience's discovery as a designed experience, not a marketing event.
The Coordination Problem
- My workspace currently tracks 113 projects. Most are idle or frozen, experiments, tools, personal projects, and archives from the media pipeline journey. About 14 are actively maintained. The main creative container and its sub-projects are the core.
I coordinate across multiple AI agents: different models for different tasks, routed by complexity and capability. There's a shared context bridge that stays current, a PM layer with automated GitHub sweeps across repositories, and a handoff system so any agent session can pick up where the last one left off without losing state.
- I built a memory filesystem for cold-start recovery. I built a shadow export system for feeding project context into retrieval-augmented notebooks. I built commit tracking scripts, backup pipelines, and a coordination document that any new session — human or AI — reads first to understand the current state of everything.
Manage the entire operation as a workspace, not a project. Track everything. Automate what recurs. Route work to the best available tool or agent/or team if you have, by task, not by loyalty. Document for your future self; the most important collaborator you will ever have.
The Patience Problem
Some might see it as distraction. A dead end where projects go to collapse. But I am patient. I have been building for years.
I'm building because I have something heavy to lay down. Not to prove anything. Not to disprove anything. This universe asks a question that I think deserves a world built around it. I can't say what the question is without spoiling everything.
But I can say this: every tool I built, every pipeline, every automation, every agent coordination system. They all exist to serve one thing. A story written in Arabic first, because that's the language it thinks in. Published bilingually, because the story breathes differently in English. Experienced through a website that controls its own revelation. Playable through a game that asks you the same questions the novel asks its characters.
If the work lands, or if it doesn't, I built something real. The tools exist. The pipelines work. The code is tested. The words are written.
And somewhere in that stack of projects and 20 years of fragments, there's a universe that I think has something to say.
It'll say it when it's ready.
And know this: no one will care for a long time. Build anyway. The axiom holds or it doesn't. The audience arrives or it doesn't. The work is the work.
