WHO MADE THIS

No toolkit. No foreign hand. One laptop.

DHARNA 144 is made by one developer in India, in the evenings, on a laptop that has seen things. No studio, no sponsor, no party. If you were hoping for a conspiracy, sorry: it's a side project.

Why I am building this

I have been developing products, and failing, for the past two years. Being a founder of something made me realise how tough it is to work without getting paid for your work. So why not build something that doesn’t feel like I need to be paid for this work?

I was recently scrolling Twitter and watched the video of mantarjantar.com, and heard about how he made the game just using Claude. I was already cooking a project at that time around a 3D city plan, which somehow connected the dots and gave me the spark to build this game.

VERRIN, the 3D city project that came before this game: an axonometric survey of a city that does not exist.

I have also never built a game in my life, or known any of the terminology. I just bump my head into new things, simplify them for myself, and start building. Claude gives a lot of leverage, which I think happened recently, after the last few Opus updates. A few months before, I was doing the same thing, building something around the Duolingo character, and it couldn’t build the shape and its physics. It was a total disaster, and I dropped it.

I have been to many places in Delhi. Not many, but somehow many: from museums to cafes to metros. As an outsider to this city, it always amazes me how many locations it has in such a small geographical area. So that also connects me to this game and inspired me to build it, as I know Delhi by its map and its metro paths.

I also watched the memes, videos and social content around the protest. But as an individual, if I am not impacted, I don’t want to get involved physically in the cause. This is a good way to participate: to express empathy, support, or just to remember the event, which is enough to relive the movement.

An ikigai diagram: four overlapping circles, What you love, What you are good at, What the world needs and What you can be paid for, overlapping into Passion, Mission, Profession and Vocation, with Ikigai at the centre. — Ikigai: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

The way I think about this project, it is an absolute ikigai event for me. I love to build software and little hardware. I have gotten good by continuously failing at building tech products. I can be paid for my work, but it’s the community or the audience who will decide. And I think this is something the world needs, for those who want to be part of it but somehow can’t.

— admin