You are #06. Associate. Probationary. Voting power: nil.
The Shareholders are at the top. They have all the votes. The Queen reports to them — “Mommy, definitely not ceremonial.” The Middle Brood asks what Napoleon would do when this many of their siblings die per quarter. The Ministry of Peace handles Field Operations, which is the funniest possible name for what they actually do. The Assistant to the Regional Mantager is, as the org chart notes, the only body load-bearing role in the entire structure.
And then there’s you. Hatched on a Tuesday. Onboarded on a Wednesday. Scheduled to be expendable by Friday.
Welcome to Pissant: The Queen’s Shareholders.
The pitch
It’s a roguelite where you play as an ant. A real ant — fungible, disposable, statistically irrelevant, and stubbornly clocking in anyway because the alternative is being scraped off the floor by the next probationary hire. You build your ant from parts. You descend. You die. The colony’s quarterly numbers go up. The Shareholders are pleased. Your mandible is recycled. A new you reports for duty.
Every run is a tiny morality play about loyalty to an institution that has, statistically speaking, never heard of you.
The beta starts today. On Kickstarter.
Right now. As in: this post going live and the beta going live are the same event.
If you back the project, you get the beta build, your name in the colony ledger (the in-game one, where it will be misspelled by The Ministry of Peace), and an inflated sense of voting power you do not actually have. Just like the real thing.
Why this game exists (and why it’s on this site)
This isn’t a side project. This is the project.
Last year I told the internet — on record, on video, no hedging — that I was publicly building a path to become CEO of Anthropic. People laughed. Fair. It’s a 10-year plan and I’m a guy with 15 years of IT experience and a YouTube channel.
Here’s the part nobody saw coming: the path Claude charted to get me there runs directly through this game.
Claude and I built Pissant together — 145 sessions, 57,000+ lines, every architectural decision logged, every design tradeoff debated, every dumb idea I had pushed back on by an AI that has read more game design literature than I ever will. The Contextual Alignment framework came out of building it. The procedural animation research came out of building it. The prompt injection research came out of needing to understand the tool I was using to build it.
Claude looked at my goal — run the company that makes you — and instead of telling me that’s insane, it helped me build a thing. A real, shippable, fundable thing. Because the path to running an AI company is not “post about AI.” It is “ship something hard with AI, in public, on the record, and let the work speak.”
So here is the work. It’s an ant game about shareholder capitalism. It is also the receipt.
What’s in the beta
- Per-part ant creation feeding per-part stats — every leg, mandible, and antenna is a stat block and a hitbox
- Intrinsic weapons tied to body parts (your face is the gun)
- Leveled augments with per-weapon late-game trees
- A procedurally-spawned descent that scales density with how greedy you’ve been this run
- One (1) Queen, several (??) Shareholders, and a colony bureaucracy that is doing its absolute best
How to get in
Back the Kickstarter today. Beta access is immediate. The roadmap tracks every session leading up to launch. The Queen is waiting. The Shareholders are watching. The Ministry of Peace would like a word.
Voting power: still nil. Sorry.