About Atrinik
Atrinik keeps people in creative control of its game world and reserves final visual and audio assets for human creators. Codex-driven workflows primarily build and maintain the software that brings that craft to life, and direct human code contributions are welcome.
From 2009 to today
Atrinik began in 2009 under founder and original lead Zoey Rose. The 2011 releases were a major era of development, not the project's origin.
Zoey Rose founded and originally led Atrinik. She worked alongside the wider Atrinik Development Team as maps, art, music, quests, dialogue, lore, and code grew through the work of many people over the years.
See the initial 2009 sourceAtrinik's founding sources credited Daimonin and Crossfire. Classic also retains work from Atrinik contributors and appropriately licensed upstream authors. Their repository notices and per-file records—not a blanket claim—remain authoritative.
Read the Classic history and noticesAtrinik does not accept generated visual or audio assets as final game content. Clearly identified generated art or sound may serve as a temporary design drop-in until a suitable human-created replacement is found or made. Human content creators may use generative tools to help shape maps or develop quests, dialogue, and lore while directing and reviewing the result. Owner repositories are documenting the policy and auditing the existing corpus before making a blanket authorship claim. Human-created upstream work still keeps its own author, source, license, and attribution; it is not automatically Atrinik-original.
Follow the exact ownership boundariesTwo paths through the same world
The two lines share a project and a setting, but they are separate implementations with different licenses and release readiness.
The current playable line is the maintained GPL C lineage of the human-developed project, actively coordinated in the unified atrinik/classic repository. Its client, server, editor, libatrinik, and protocol share one version, release notes stream, and coordinated artifact set under GPL-2.0-or-later. Current code maintenance primarily uses Codex-driven workflows.
The replacement is a Codex-driven MIT reimplementation and improvement: a Go server, Rust client, editor, renderer and content toolkit, plus a new Protobuf protocol. Its repositories use evidence-gated provenance: independent implementation is the default, while an exact, separable historical Classic contribution may be reused at an MIT destination only when a complete-history audit proves it fits one applicable grant's past-contribution and sole-authorship scope. The Classic repository remains GPL-distributed. These foundations do not yet form a complete game release or replace the playable Classic line.
The current development model
Software development primarily uses Codex-driven agents under maintainer direction, with documented ownership, provenance review, tests, and repository validation. This describes the main workflow; it is not a claim that every line or commit was written by an agent.
People set the creative direction for maps, archetypes, stories, dialogue, graphics, animation, music, and sound effects. Generative tools may help a content creator shape terrain or develop writing. Generated visual and audio assets remain temporary, clearly marked design drop-ins and must be replaced for final use.
People can contribute code directly. Human-written and agent-written changes pass the same review, evidence-gated provenance, licensing, and validation gates; contributors do not need to use an agent.