I started Buildoverse because I missed something.
I grew up on the old brick-building games. The ones where you'd log in after school and there'd be some 12-year-old's half-broken obstacle course waiting for you, and it didn't matter that it was ugly because your friends were in it. Most of those communities are gone now, or got absorbed into one big platform that doesn't really care about the people building on it. I wanted that feeling back. So I started making it myself.
The first version was nothing. A Node server, a single brick, a browser tab. I moved a cube on one screen and watched it move on another and that was the whole hook. Everything since has just been removing limits from that one moment.
It grew. Slowly at first, then in these long stretches where I'd disappear into the code for weeks. A real brick format, plain text so you could read it with your eyes. Full XYZ rotation, materials, anchoring, per-world environment settings. Then a second client so the server could outlive any one engine choice. Then a Workshop tool for building offline. Then avatars, hats, tools, faces. Then user uploads, meshes, textures, the whole asset pipeline behind a CDN with fallback chains so nothing old ever broke. Then real hosting, real rate limits, real defenses for when the bots showed up. And they did show up.
There's a moment I keep coming back to. The first time I let strangers in and watched two people I'd never met build something together in a place I made. They didn't know each other, didn't know me, didn't know any of the stuff under the hood. They were just building. That was the moment it stopped being a project and became the thing I wanted it to be. For a while there I thought I'd actually pulled it off. Years of work, alone, mostly in the dark, and it was real. People were in it. It was running. It was mine.
Then my health started slipping.
I tried to keep going. I told myself it'd pass, then I told myself I could work around it, then I told myself I'd just push through one more sprint. None of that worked. The bills started showing up faster than I could pay them. Hosting costs and treatment costs don't care which one is more important to you. I've stretched this as far as I can stretch it and I'm out of room. I either let it quietly go dark or I hand it to someone who'll actually keep it alive.
I'd rather hand it off. There's too much in here to just let it die.
Child safety, the part I refused to cut corners on
This is the part I want to be clearest about, because it's the part I think most platforms my size never bother with, and the part the big platforms get wrong.
Every user-uploaded asset, image, mesh, texture, avatar, place thumbnail, every chat message, every text field, runs through a moderation pipeline before it goes live. Images and 3D textures are scanned for CSAM and other illegal content using hash matching against known sets, plus a model-based classifier for unknown content, before they're ever served to another user. Text goes through its own moderation model tuned for grooming patterns, not just profanity. Anything flagged gets quarantined automatically and queued for human review. There are audit logs. There are reporting tools that actually go somewhere.
Roblox's answer to child safety was to split their app into different age-rated versions. I think that's the wrong answer. It treats safety as a UX problem (keep the kids in their own room) instead of a content problem (don't let the bad stuff onto the platform in the first place). It also assumes age gates work, and they don't, kids lie about their age, adults lie about theirs, and the bad actors lie hardest of all. Splitting the app just gives parents a false sense of security while the underlying moderation problem is exactly the same on both sides of the wall.
Buildoverse's approach is the opposite: one platform, one set of rules, every piece of content moderated before it can hurt anyone, regardless of who uploaded it or who's looking at it. It's more expensive to run and harder to build but it's the only version of this I was willing to ship.
If you take it over, this is the part I'd ask you not to gut. Everything else is negotiable.
What's actually there
- Multiplayer that works. Strangers can join the same server and build together right now.
- Two clients (Godot and web) sharing one server, one asset pipeline, one brick format.
- A standalone Workshop editor for offline building.
- Avatars, hats, tools, faces, user-uploaded meshes and textures, catalog frontend.
- Full content moderation pipeline (image/mesh/texture scanning, text moderation, hash matching, classifier review, human review queue, audit logs).
- Hosting infra that's already survived real traffic and real abuse.
- Years of architectural decisions written down so whoever takes it doesn't have to relearn them.
What isn't done
- The scripting API is small. You can build worlds but you can't really build *games* in it yet. That's the next big leap and it's the one I won't get to make.
- Catalog/economy is barebones. No payouts, no marketplace yet.
- Discovery is mostly word of mouth.
- Some of the builder UI is rough.
What you'd be getting
- The full codebase: server, both clients, Workshop, frontend, asset pipeline, moderation pipeline.
- The brick format and parser (both variants supported).
- The hosting setup and infra config.
- The itch listing, the domain, the community, all of it.
- Me. For as long as I'm able, walking you through everything so you're not staring at a wall of code.
itch listing: https://soulaffinity.itch.io/buildoverse
If you're interested, or you just want to ask about the tech side, comment or DM me. I'm not picky about who takes it. I just want to know it's going to keep existing after I can't carry it anymore.
Thanks for reading.