/projects/russianlands
Russian Lands
Eighteen months of evenings, over a thousand hours of work — and not a single line written by AI. The game went to production: more than 500 players on day one and 20% day-one retention.
Project numbers
1000+hours of tracked work
500+sign-ups on day one
200+peak concurrent players
20%day-one retention
5%day-30 retention
1.5 yearsof building it alongside a full-time job
01
What the game is
- A story campaign that takes dozens of hours.
- Turn-based combat with weapons, scrolls and potions; character progression and inventory.
- A random item generator and daily refreshed enemies in locations you have already cleared.
- A PvP arena with rewards for player battles.
- A city you build and upgrade to unlock new options.
- An in-game shop with real payments, daily rewards and a referral system.
02
How it is built
- A .NET server application that runs on both Windows and Linux.
- Three projects in one repository: the bot, a game-data editor and a statistics viewer.
- GUIs for the editor and the statistics viewer built with Avalonia UI and MVVM.
- Player progress in SQLite, with daily statistics snapshots stored in separate databases.
- An HTTP admin panel authenticated through Telegram, so the project can be managed from a browser.
- Payments through LAVA.RU, with the code written to allow other payment providers later.
- In production it runs in webhook mode: Telegram pushes updates to the server through nginx.
03
What it took
- Eighteen months of free time alongside a full-time job.
- Over 1000 hours, tracked so I could see the real price of the project.
- The project went to production and was battle-tested by real players: the retention and payment numbers are actual, not targets.
- It went from prototype to production and survived contact with a live audience — payments, support and content updates included.
- I chose not to take it further: I lost interest and picked the developer career instead. The project is public and free to use, commercial purposes included.
04
Why it matters
- This is the last large project I wrote entirely by hand, without a single line from AI.
- It shows the whole cycle: server logic, database, payments, admin panel, and tooling for content and analytics.
- And it is not a demo: real players, real metrics, a real economy.