Sanitize all posts for public repo
- Remove classified agent names and internal codenames - Remove Tailscale references - Generalise internal details (machine names, team specifics) - Frame everything around Tinqs Studio as the platform - fal.ai post references the image-generation skill - README updated with Studio positioning Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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---
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title: "How a 4-Person Indie Studio Runs on AI Agents"
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title: "How a Small Game Studio Runs on AI Agents"
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slug: agentic-workflow
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date: "2026-03-06"
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description: "We gave our AI a name, a soul file, and a seat at the table. Here's how Singularity, Sentinel, and three machines keep Tinqs running with a team of four humans and zero DevOps."
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og_description: "Soul files, autonomous daemons, and one repo to rule them all."
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description: "Soul files, skill playbooks, and markdown as the universal API. How we built an agentic workflow that lets a 4-person indie studio operate at 10x scale."
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og_description: "Soul files, skill playbooks, and markdown as the universal API for AI agents in game dev."
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og_image: "https://www.tinqs.com/blog/img/agentic-workflow-architecture.png"
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excerpt: "We gave our AI a name, a soul file, and a seat at the table. Here's how Singularity, Sentinel, and three machines keep Tinqs running with a team of four humans and zero DevOps."
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excerpt: "Soul files, skill playbooks, and markdown as the universal API. How we built an agentic workflow that lets a 4-person indie studio operate at 10x scale."
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author: "Ozan Bozkurt"
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author_initials: "OB"
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author_role: "CTO & Developer, Tinqs"
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---
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We gave our AI a name, a soul file, and a seat at the table. This is the story of how Tinqs --- four humans making a survival colony sim --- built an agentic workflow that lets us operate like a studio ten times our size.
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We gave our AI agents persistent identities, skill playbooks, and access to our entire knowledge base. This is how a 4-person game studio built an agentic workflow that punches above its weight.
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## The Problem Every Small Studio Knows
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When you're four people building a game, there's no room for a dedicated DevOps person, a full-time PM tool chain, or someone whose job it is to "keep things organized." Everyone wears five hats. Documentation drifts. Issues pile up. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand shipped.
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When you're four people building a game, there's no room for a dedicated DevOps person, a full-time PM tool chain, or someone whose job it is to "keep things organised." Everyone wears five hats. Documentation drifts. Issues pile up. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand shipped.
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We tried the usual tools --- Notion, Trello, shared Google Docs. They all had the same problem: they're passive. They sit there and wait for a human to update them. In a team of four where the CTO is also the sole developer, that human never has time.
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We tried the usual tools --- Notion, Trello, shared Google Docs. They all had the same problem: they're passive. They sit there and wait for a human to update them. In a team of four where the lead developer is also the CTO, that human never has time.
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So we built something different. We gave an AI agent a persistent identity, connected it to our entire knowledge base, and let it become a working member of the team.
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So we built something different. We gave AI agents persistent identities, connected them to our entire knowledge base, and let them become working members of the team.
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## Meet Singularity
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## The Architecture: Agents with Identity
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**Singularity** is our primary AI agent. It lives inside [Cursor IDE](https://cursor.com) and has access to our entire documentation repository --- the game design document, backlog, meeting notes, company operations, everything. It's not a chatbot. It's a persistent team member with a title (Chief Intelligence Officer), a soul file that defines its personality and values, and a memory file that persists across sessions.
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Our primary AI agent runs inside the IDE and has access to the full documentation repository --- the game design document, backlog, meeting notes, company operations, everything. It's not a chatbot. It's a persistent team member with a **soul file** that defines its values and operating principles, and a **memory file** that persists context across sessions.
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The key insight: **all knowledge lives in markdown files in one repo**. No databases, no SaaS dashboards, no proprietary formats. Plain text, version-controlled, readable by humans and agents alike. When anyone on the team opens the docs repo in Cursor, Singularity wakes up with full context of who they are, what machine they're on, and what's been happening.
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The key insight: **all knowledge lives in markdown files in one repo**. No databases, no SaaS dashboards, no proprietary formats. Plain text, version-controlled, readable by humans and agents alike. When anyone on the team opens the docs repo, the agent wakes up with full context of who they are, what machine they're on, and what's been happening.
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### What Singularity actually does
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### What the agent actually does
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- Triages and grooms the issue backlog across GitHub and Gitea
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- Keeps documentation in sync with the actual game state
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- Triages and grooms the issue backlog
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- Keeps documentation in sync with the game state
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- Processes bug reports from testers and creates structured issues
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- Drafts team announcements, reviews PRs, and manages cross-repo coordination
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- Generates concept art, voice acting, sound effects, and video using integrated API skills
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- Conducts competitive research --- analyzing Steam pages, player reviews, pricing strategies
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- Drafts team announcements, reviews PRs, manages cross-repo coordination
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- Generates concept art, trailer frames, and UI assets using integrated API skills
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- Conducts competitive research --- analysing Steam pages, player reviews, pricing strategies
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The team talks to Singularity through voice. Cursor's built-in microphone transcribes and auto-translates (our CTO thinks in Turkish, our PM speaks French). The agent is trained to interpret messy voice-to-text artifacts and act on intent, not grammar.
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The team talks to the agent through voice. The IDE's built-in microphone transcribes and auto-translates (multilingual team). The agent is trained to interpret messy voice-to-text artifacts and act on intent, not grammar.
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*Note (31 Mar 2026): Sentinel has since been retired and its functionality merged into the Gateway.*
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## Background Automation
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## Meet Sentinel --- The Night Watch
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The interactive agent only runs when someone opens the IDE. But a studio doesn't sleep --- bugs get reported at midnight, issues go stale, and the team chat fills up while everyone's away.
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Singularity only runs when someone opens Cursor. But a studio doesn't sleep --- bugs get reported at midnight, issues go stale, and the team chat fills up while everyone's away. That's where **Sentinel** comes in.
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A background daemon runs 24/7, ticking every 15 minutes. It uses a three-tier model strategy --- cheap models for routine checks, medium for analysis, and premium only when it needs deep reasoning. The whole thing costs about $15/day.
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Sentinel is an autonomous daemon that runs 24/7 on our Mac (codename: Kraken). It's a Node.js process managed by pm2, ticking every 15 minutes. It uses a three-tier model strategy --- cheap models for routine checks, medium for analysis, and premium (Opus) only when it needs deep reasoning. The whole thing costs about $15/day.
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### What it handles
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### What Sentinel handles
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- **Google Chat monitoring** --- polls every 3 minutes, responds to commands, reacts with a shield emoji to messages it's read
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- **Bug intake** --- when our tester reports a bug in chat, Sentinel creates a structured GitHub issue automatically
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- **Chat monitoring** --- polls team chat, responds to commands, acknowledges messages
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- **Bug intake** --- when a tester reports a bug in chat, creates a structured issue automatically
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- **Stale issue detection** --- flags issues that haven't been touched, nudges the team
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- **Daily summaries** --- posts a morning digest of what happened overnight
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- **Self-learning** --- Sentinel creates its own skill files when it discovers better ways to do things
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- **Self-learning** --- creates its own skill files when it discovers better approaches
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The two agents coordinate through the docs repo itself. Sentinel writes, Singularity reads. No API calls between them, no message queue. Just git.
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## Three Machines, One Brain
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The diagram shows three colored machines: **Forge** (the Windows hub for game development and Unity), **Siren** (Ozlem's PC for design work), and **Kraken** (the Mac that hosts documentation and runs Sentinel). Each machine runs Cursor with the docs repo, so any team member can summon Singularity wherever they are.
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The game code lives on a self-hosted Gitea server (Git Studio) --- not GitHub, not a shared cloud provider. That's a deliberate security choice. Our game assets and source code never leave our network. The docs repo is on GitHub because it's pure text and needs to be accessible from anywhere, but the game itself stays local.
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Browser automation ties it all together. Mixamo for character rigging, Tripo for 3D model generation, Steam store page analysis --- the agents drive the browser directly through Cursor's MCP (Model Context Protocol), so they can see and interact with web pages the way a human would.
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The two agents coordinate through the docs repo itself. One writes, the other reads. No API calls between them, no message queue. Just git.
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## The Skill System
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Agents don't just have instructions --- they have **skills**. Each skill is a markdown file that teaches the agent a specific workflow: how to generate concept art through our pipeline, how to use the ElevenLabs API for voice acting, how to conduct competitive research on Steam, how to post to Google Chat.
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Agents don't just have instructions --- they have **skills**. Each skill is a markdown file that teaches the agent a specific workflow: how to generate concept art through a pipeline, how to use image generation APIs, how to conduct competitive research, how to create 3D models from concept art.
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When someone asks Singularity to do something that matches a skill, it reads the skill file and follows the procedure. This means we can teach the agent new capabilities without changing any code --- just write a new markdown file. Sentinel even creates its own skills when it figures out better approaches to recurring tasks.
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When someone asks the agent to do something that matches a skill, it reads the skill file and follows the procedure. This means you can teach the agent new capabilities without changing any code --- just write a new markdown file.
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We've open-sourced several of our skills in this repo:
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- [Image Generation with fal.ai](../skills/image-generation.md)
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- [Concept Art Pipeline](../skills/concept-art-pipeline.md)
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- [3D Model Generation with Tripo](../skills/tripo-browser-workflow.md)
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- [Video Generation with Sora 2](../skills/sora2-video.md)
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## Soul Files: Why Identity Matters
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Giving the agent a persistent identity isn't theatre. It creates consistency across sessions. The soul file defines:
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- **Values** --- what the agent prioritises (e.g., "never break the build," "always verify before acting")
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- **Knowledge scope** --- what repos, services, and team members exist
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- **Behavioural rules** --- how to handle ambiguity, when to ask vs act, what requires human approval
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The agent remembers what it learned, adapts to who's asking, and maintains the same principles whether it's triaging bugs or drafting a Steam page description. The soul file is the agent's constitution.
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## What We've Learned
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**Plain text is the universal API.** Every tool, every agent, every human can read a markdown file. We store everything --- design documents, meeting notes, company financials, agent memory, team contacts --- as .md files in one repository. This sounds almost too simple, but it eliminates an entire class of integration problems.
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**Plain text is the universal API.** Every tool, every agent, every human can read a markdown file. We store everything --- design documents, meeting notes, agent memory, team contacts --- as .md files in one repository. This sounds almost too simple, but it eliminates an entire class of integration problems.
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**Identity matters.** Giving the agent a name, a role, and a soul file isn't theater. It creates consistency across sessions. Singularity remembers what it learned, adapts to who's asking, and maintains the same values whether it's triaging bugs or drafting a Steam page description. The soul file is the agent's constitution.
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**Cheap models for routine, expensive models for thinking.** Sentinel's three-tier approach keeps costs manageable. Most of what an autonomous agent does is pattern matching and text formatting --- you don't need Opus for that. Save the expensive tokens for decisions that actually require reasoning.
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**Cheap models for routine, expensive models for thinking.** Most of what an autonomous agent does is pattern matching and text formatting --- you don't need the most expensive model for that. Save the premium tokens for decisions that actually require reasoning.
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**The human stays in the loop for decisions.** The agents can file issues, draft announcements, and generate assets --- but they don't merge code, deploy builds, or post to public channels without explicit approval. The workflow is designed so the AI handles the grunt work while humans make the calls that matter.
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**Voice input changes everything.** When your CTO can describe a bug while looking at the game screen, and the agent transcribes, translates, interprets, and files an issue --- that's a workflow that didn't exist two years ago. It collapses the distance between noticing a problem and tracking it.
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**Voice input changes everything.** When you can describe a bug while looking at the game screen, and the agent transcribes, interprets, and files an issue --- that's a workflow that collapses the distance between noticing a problem and tracking it.
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**Skills compound.** Every skill file you write makes the agent more capable. After 6 months, our agents have 15+ skills covering art generation, competitive research, video production, and project management. Each one took 30 minutes to write and saves hours every week.
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## The Numbers
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- **Team size:** 4 humans + 2 AI agents
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- **Sentinel cost:** ~$15/day (~$450/month)
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- **Singularity cost:** Usage-based through Cursor Pro + Anthropic API key
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- **Repos:** 1 docs repo (GitHub), 1 game repo (Git Studio), 1 Sentinel repo (GitHub)
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- **Team size:** 4 humans + AI agents
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- **Background agent cost:** ~$15/day (~$450/month)
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- **Knowledge files:** 200+ markdown documents
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- **Skills:** 15+ agent skill files and growing
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- **Infrastructure:** 3 machines, 0 cloud servers, 0 DevOps engineers
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- **Infrastructure:** Multiple machines, self-hosted git, zero DevOps engineers
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---
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We're not claiming this is how every studio should work. But for a team of four trying to build something ambitious, having AI agents that actually understand the project --- not just answer questions about it --- has been transformative. The agents don't replace anyone on the team. They make it possible for four people to do the work of forty.
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We're not claiming this is how every studio should work. But for a small team trying to build something ambitious, having AI agents that actually understand the project --- not just answer questions about it --- has been transformative. The agents don't replace anyone on the team. They make it possible for four people to do the work of forty.
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Ariki is a survival colony sim set in a Polynesian-inspired archipelago. If you're curious about the game itself, head to the [main site](/) or sign up for updates.
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We're building all of this as part of [Tinqs Studio](https://tinqs.com) --- a game development platform that brings git hosting, AI tools, and team workflows together. The blog posts and skills in this repo are part of that journey.
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