Press kit

Use any image here however you like. Keys for press and creators: hello@quietmachines.net, with a link to your channel or outlet.

Fork Bomb

What it is: A single-player programming game about self-replicating machines
Developer: Quiet Machines (solo developer, Ellis)
Release: Steam Early Access, 2 October 2026
Platform / price: Windows · $9.99 USD
Links: Steam · Trailer · Game page

You get one machine on a dead rock and a text editor. You program it in a small Python-like language. Around lesson four it learns to build a copy of itself, and the copy runs your code from the top. From there the game is your program at scale. Machines converge on the same ore and starve, the swarm blocks its own corridors, and every machine has a fixed instruction budget per tick. There are no stat upgrades. Every unit of progress is a new function, and the hardest levels take functions away.

11 guided lessons and 39 scenarios across four tiers
Sandbox with about 30 world settings, plus a daily challenge
Deterministic simulation, scored on ticks, instructions, lines of code and energy
17 machine functions, including move(), mine(), sense() and spawn()
Plain-English errors, searchable API reference, print(), autocomplete, optional vim keys
About 15 to 30 hours to see every lesson and scenario
23 Steam achievements and Steam Cloud saves

key art

lesson

THE CROWD

EXPONENTIAL

Adverse Action

What it is: A single-player paperwork thriller and deduction game about explaining decisions a machine won't explain
Developer: Quiet Machines (solo developer, Ellis)
Release: Steam Early Access, 27 August 2026
Platform / price: Windows · $12.99 USD · free demo
Links: Steam · Trailer · Game page

A scoring model decides who in the city of Newmark gets credit, housing, insurance and a utility connection. It does not explain itself, but the law says every denial must carry a signed Statement of Reasons, prepared by a person. That's you, at Desk 9. Read the file, work out which fact the model acted on, cite the lines that prove it, and decide whether to sign. Then the model gets retrained.