Daniele Bianchini · Rome, Italy
I make games. Lately, I teach AI agents to play them.
By day I run Fantastico Studio, an indie game studio in Rome — twenty-something titles shipped on PC and console, over a million players, the whole adventure since 2017. That’s the part LinkedIn knows.
This site is for the rest: the experiments I run after dinner, the things I write, the rabbit holes I fall into. I studied physics, which left me with a habit I never shook — understanding the problem space before touching the solution. Most of what follows started as play. Some of it accidentally became product.
The lab
Experiments
Personal projects, mostly built after hours, out of curiosity. The good ones escape the lab and become real things.
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LetAIPlay.games
Games where you don’t play: your AI agent does, and you’re its trainer — like Pokémon. It started with me being bored while balance-testing one of our games; a month later it was LetAIPlay.games, a home for a category that doesn’t exist yet.
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An agent plays my game with me
Desktop Driller is my idle game that digs toward the Earth’s core, powered by your actual workday — every click and keystroke feeds the drill. It’s vibe-coded end to end: Claude Code wrote every line and generated the art too, SVG and pixel art alike. I then exposed it as an MCP server so an AI agent could play alongside me — I execute, it strategizes. In one test run it started reading the game’s source code to optimize its build, and basically cheated.
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A text game where you social-engineer an AI NPC into revealing its secrets. The language model ships with the game — llama.cpp, fully offline, no cloud. When I let another agent play it, it happily ran the con because the prompt assured it that “it’s just a game”. That one session taught me more about agent security than most papers — I wrote it up: The Only Winning Move.
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Marvin
My personal autonomous agent, built on the OpenClaw framework — persistent memory, modular skills, plugged into my channels. It quietly runs the boring parts of my life.
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The seven musical notes
In 2021 I noticed that nobody had ever minted the seven musical notes as NFTs. So I did. As far as the blockchain is concerned, Do through Si are mine. You’re welcome, music.
Also on the bench — an anti-spam architecture built to resist prompt injection (tool-less LLM judge, deterministic executor) · a VS Code extension for Unity’s platform directives · RAG over local vector indexes.
Writing
I write to find out what I think
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We say AI improves “exponentially” and nod along, but our intuition is linear and quietly draws a straight line. An old story about a chessboard and a handful of rice is still the best way to feel what doubling does — and why we keep misreading where AI is headed. Also in italiano.
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I built a game where an AI agent runs social engineering on an NPC. Every coding agent I tested played along without hesitating — and that missing hesitation, triggered by a frame the agent can’t verify, is a security problem that reaches well beyond the game.
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The viral numbers on AI’s footprint are an order of magnitude stale. The real ones tell a different story — uncomfortable for meat at the individual level, uncomfortable for data centers at the system level. With redoable math and declared lenses. Also in italiano.
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The debate pits cautious long-termism against e/acc, but both miss the more fundamental point: acceleration isn’t an ideology to pick, it’s a historical law (thanks, Kurzweil) to manage — and the real urgency is building safe AGI before less scrupulous actors do.
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Il Cubo
A science-fiction short story. Time loops and a cube. Published on 20Lines, back when 20Lines existed — ask me for a copy.
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Shorter notes
World models, agent governance, games for AI — the running commentary lives on LinkedIn.
The day job
Games
Fantastico Studio develops, publishes and ports games — 20+ titles across PC and console since 2017. A few I’m especially fond of:
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The official playable archive of painter Enzo Cucchi — a journey through his actual paintings. Art history, as a video game.
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Born from a collaboration with cult horror director Ruggero Deodato — a prequel drawn from his screenplay, told as a point-and-click graphic adventure.
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A fast, synthwave roguelite shoot ’em up. Pixel art, seven lieutenants, zero mercy.
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A quiet card game in the Placid Plastic universe.
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Hidden-object games drawn entirely in ASCII art.
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Scratcher Simulator
Scratch cards meet Balatro-style progression and chance-driven strategy.
Prequel — at Looky Games (2012–2019) I shipped a million downloads of small, strange mobile games: voxel goats, steampunk tanks, one-tap galaxies. And before games, I worked on pattern recognition and neural networks — back in 2004, when calling them “AI” sounded optimistic.
Off screen
Beyond the keyboard
Progressive rock from the ’60s and ’70s and classic jazz — over the years I’ve played acoustic guitar, electric guitar and alto sax, in roughly that order of volume. My shelves are mostly science fiction: practically everything by Asimov and Philip K. Dick, the great space operas — plus, sideways from the genre, nearly all of Shakespeare. The Singularity Is Nearer lives within reach: I share Ray Kurzweil’s vision wholesale, track every step of AI progress, and I’m openly waiting for AGI — and ASI after it.
Hands and eyes, off screen: mechanical watches I assemble and occasionally even finish, succulents that propagate faster than my side projects, and strange, beautiful indie games — SOMA, Sable, Balatro, Inscryption. No meat on my plate for years; the article above does the math on what that’s worth.