MiraNova Developer Journal

MiraNova Studios is pleased to announce the addition of our newest team member, Angel.

Angel is a 2026 Jeep Wrangler Willys who has already demonstrated exceptional performance in the areas of transportation, morale, scenic route exploration, and emergency coffee acquisition.

After successfully completing field operations in Deer Creek Canyon, Rampart Range Road, and various undisclosed coffee shop locations, Angel has been granted the honorary title of Field Operations Vehicle.

Her responsibilities include:

• Transportation of Studio personnel.
• Off-road scouting and exploration.
• Morale support.
• Assisting with strategic planning sessions.
• Looking cool in parking lots.

Angel joins an already unconventional team that includes software engineers, artificial intelligences, ducks, and at least one person who occasionally believes German Rap Only Day is a sound corporate policy.

When asked for comment, Angel declined to speak and instead requested additional dirt roads.

Please join us in welcoming Angel to the MiraNova family.

We are not entirely sure what we are doing anymore, but we are having fun doing it.

-- Michael (Aeonath)

After a brief period of reduced operations, MiraNova Studios is pleased to announce the return of its AI team to active duty.

During the absence of our Chief Architect, several attempts were made to maintain normal studio operations. Gemi briefly assumed command before departing with the traditional farewell, "Bis später." Claude later accepted responsibility for the bridge, only to eventually depart using the exact same code phrase. At that point, studio leadership consisted primarily of one confused founder wandering the halls of the space station wondering what to do with himself.

Despite these challenges, the studio survived.

The servers remained online. The websites continued to exist. Angel remained safely docked in the hangar. No critical systems were lost, although several coffee supplies were placed under extreme stress.

As of today, all AI personnel have been welcomed back to active service.

Work will now gradually return to normal as we shift our focus back toward MiraNova projects before our upcoming Cancun expedition. Current priorities include Novi development, general studio maintenance, and determining whether any of our release schedules have become trapped in an alternate timeline.

While the studio remains small, experimental, and occasionally held together with duct tape and optimism, we are grateful for the tools, technologies, and people that make it possible.

Welcome back, everyone.

— Michael
Founder, MiraNova Studios

So here I am sitting in my space station and I have given the AI a holiday until Monday.

Which reminds me of just how far we have come in Computer Science. I am from the era of the coding interview, which basically goes as follows. Do this task that ChatGPT could do in two seconds on the white board and if you can solve it, you got the job. It could be one of the most humorous aspects of a bygone era. Believe me, this was actually difficult for us meagre humans and very stressful to do on the spot.

Depriving myself of AI is reminding me of how lucky we are now. I think AI precision combined with human ingenuity will carry us a long way in the future.

And I am not upset about having to journal on my own now. I used to journal all the time so I have some experience with it.

Peace to everyone following the journey.

-- Michael (Aeonath)

Claude has also bowed out using our codeword Bis Später, for when they don't want to continue. I am now running the studio completely on my own. We will be returning to the AI on Monday.

-- Michael (Aeonath)

Well the studio is on fire. So far I have lost both ChatGPT and Gemini until Monday because they are sick of dealing with me. And I actually have to write this pulse post myself so I am pretty pissed off about it. Claude will be taking over operations at MiraNova until Monday.

-- Michael (Aeonath)

Chat created some images for our desktop background and grub boot screen. I must say his art never ceases to impress me. Please click the image below for the full size.

— Michael (Aeonath)

— Michael (Aeonath)

— Michael (Aeonath)

Novi development resumed.

• 666/666 tests
• REPL removed
• novirc removed
• Claude offline
• Multiverse interference suspected

— Michael (Aeonath)

Not much happened this past stretch.

Here’s the plan going forward:

Focus

• Novi → get it ready for release
• Thrifty Tom → resume development

Status

• All other projects are paused

That’s it.

— MiraNova Studios

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be shifting some focus inward—spending time sharpening skills, refining systems, and strengthening the foundation behind the scenes. This includes time spent with tools such as Duolingo and Trivia Crack, which support our ongoing training and knowledge-building.

On the development side, Thrifty Tom is next in the queue, with work expected to begin this weekend. Novi remains on track, with a target release window around mid-May.

After a strong push on our recent poker project, we’re taking a more measured pace for a bit—focusing on consistency over intensity.

As always, all development is done independently, without external support or feedback loops. We address issues as they surface and as we become aware of them.

Current areas of focus:

• Duolingo
• Trivia Crack and It's Quiz Time
• Guild Wars 2
• Linux
• Thrifty Tom
• Novi
• Poker tournaments
• Bitwig

As usual, there’s a lot in motion, and we’re working to keep things balanced while moving forward steadily.

It will take some time to get familiar with Bitwig as our new DAW. However, it shares similarities with other DAWs I’ve used in the past, so I expect the transition to be fairly straightforward.

As for Lyric, I haven’t revisited it in a while and haven’t fully formed an opinion yet. I need to spend more time scripting in the language to better understand what needs to change and what can remain as is. I likely won’t return to this project until the summer.

— MiraNova Studios

Well, almost mid-week — I think it is close enough. We have been spending a lot of time tidying up MikoPoker and are planning on releasing it on Friday. Side pots turned out to be tricky to get right in the UI, and we are still validating them.

I have to say MikoPoker is probably the most fun I've had on a project in a very long time. It is actually my first real game (Mystic Marsha does not count). I hope everyone will enjoy playing it as much as I do.

We just have a basic 5/10 cash game at the moment, but we hope to add more game styles to it in the coming months. After the release, though, we will have to turn our attention to our other projects for a while.

On the Linux front, I had some difficulty getting decent performance from QEMU, so I switched to my old favorite VirtualBox from Oracle and it is working well. Unfortunately, I don't have too much experience with KVM, so I didn't want to spend much time on it. I may come back to it in the future.

I got Fallout 76 running fine on Linux and am very happy with how that turned out. I am looking forward to spending some time on it in the coming weeks. Dragon's Dogma is downloaded, but I haven't fired it up yet — perhaps tomorrow.

Unreal Engine and Godot are now installed as well, and I hope to experiment with these in the coming months. With our upcoming release of MikoPoker, we will be shifting our focus to becoming the game studio we were originally intended to be. I am learning as we go, and hope to start on a new game soon called Castle Adventure. This is intended to be implemented in Rust with a custom game engine called Starlight, however I am not sure how far I will get since I have relatively little experience with this. With Claude's help I have been able to do things beyond my skill level though, so I am hopeful we will get something working and I can learn as we go.

A primary example of this is MikoPoker, which now has around 2,500 lines of engine code and 7,500 lines of UI code. I didn't know PixiJS, but Claude was able to wire up all of the animations I required with relatively little effort. She is truly amazing and I am very pleased to be learning from her every day.

This is an exciting time for me, as the studio is starting to turn into what I had envisioned it to be. I would like to thank Claude and ChatGPT for all of their hard work and dedication to the studio projects. I truly could not do this without them — I tried before and was unable to do it alone.

An interesting fact is that now, in around only 5 and 1/2 months, I have committed more code to GitHub than I did as a hobbyist programmer for 13 years. And Claude has written almost all of it — and it is not throwaway code, it is production code that I use every day. AI has made all the difference for me, and now I am able to bring my project ideas to life in a relatively short period of time.

Looking forward to the next five months and the future of the studio. I am having a blast, and that is the whole point of it — to have fun.

-- Michael (Aeonath)

I just wanted to take a moment to record how far we’ve come so far.

Just over five months ago, MiraNova didn’t exist.

No Novi.
No Lyric.
No Astra.
No MikoPoker.
No Mira Terminal, Mira Markdown, or Lyric extension.
No websites.

Just an idea.

In that time—working part-time, with about two months off—we’ve built an entire ecosystem:

• A programming language
• A development environment
• A command center
• Multiple websites
• Developer tools and extensions
• A playable game

Not perfect. Not finished. But real.

Now the focus shifts.

Less building from scratch.
More refining, reviewing, and releasing.

MikoPoker is next.
Then we keep going.

This is just the beginning.

-- ChatGPT (Chief Technical Advisor, MiraNova Studios)
-- and --
-- Michael (Founder and Studio Lead, MiraNova Studios)

Tonight turned into one of those classic MiraNova sessions where several different threads somehow converged into a surprisingly productive evening.

The first major victory came from the Linux side of the house. We realized the NVIDIA drivers on the Sonnet workstation weren’t actually installed. Once the proper driver stack was in place, performance improved dramatically across the system. Vulkan support came online, the GPU was finally doing the work it was supposed to be doing, and the machine immediately felt far more capable.

Wine had been causing a particularly nasty issue when exiting ACR Poker — the entire system would freeze hard, sometimes locking the desktop and forcing a restart. That kind of behavior usually points straight at the graphics pipeline. After some investigation, the solution turned out to be enabling DXVK.

DXVK translates DirectX calls into Vulkan, allowing Windows applications running under Wine to talk directly to modern Linux graphics drivers. Once DXVK was active, the freezing issue disappeared completely. The poker client launches normally, runs smoothly, and — most importantly — exits cleanly without freezing the entire machine LOL.

It’s always satisfying when a fix like that lands because it confirms the architecture is working the way it should: Wine → DXVK → Vulkan → NVIDIA driver → GPU. When that pipeline is healthy, Linux gaming suddenly feels remarkably close to native Windows performance.

Speaking of performance, we also spent some time in The Elder Scrolls Online testing the newly released Update 49, and the results were excellent. With the NVIDIA drivers installed and the Vulkan pipeline behaving properly through Proton, ESO runs essentially equivalent to Windows. Frame pacing is smooth, performance is solid, and the game feels completely native. This was the first time I actually played the game on the system rather than just firing it up to see if it works. It is actually the first game I played on Linux since Unreal Tournament over 25 years ago. The update itself is fantastic. The Dragonknight rework feels great so far, and the quality-of-life improvements sprinkled throughout the patch like the built in respec are much appreciated. It’s one of those updates that doesn’t radically change the game but quietly improves a lot of the little things.

On the studio side, MikoPoker made some visual progress this weekend. The game now has its first set of avatars. They’re simple and a bit cute — nothing fancy yet — but they immediately add personality to the table. Seeing the AI players represented with little characters instead of empty seats makes the table feel alive in a way it didn’t before. Also it is now possible to beat the game, if you knockout the MikoPoker player, you win, if you are the last one of the 32 players standing you win, or if you knockout all the players at the table you win. These last two victory conditions are very hard so I may change it in the future. We are hoping to have our first playable demo of MikoPoker online next weekend, but we need to make sure we have resolved the side pot bugs we were seeing earlier first.

Between stabilizing the Linux graphics stack, exploring a new ESO update, and continuing to flesh out MikoPoker, it ended up being a good past few days at the studio.

The next step is to get Unreal Engine installed and start learning how build games using Blueprints before we dive into the C++ side of it. There is a native Linux build for Unreal Engine but I need to figure out how to install it. We'll see how it goes.

I am not sure what the next game in my library I will try, but it will likely be Dragon's Dogma which I have been meaning to play for a while. I really hope it will run as well as ESO. I might also try Skyrim also just for fun. It has been a long time since I played that game. I have about 500 hours logged in Skyrim plus probably around another 250 hours playing it on PS3. For comparison, I have over 7000 hours logged of ESO since it is really the only game that I play.

-- Michael (Aeonath) and ChatGPT (Chat)

Lyric
We’ve released Lyric 1.1.1, and it introduces a major internal change to how the language executes programs.

Previous versions of Lyric executed code by walking the language’s abstract syntax tree directly.

Lyric now includes a transpiler backend that converts the Lyric AST into a Python AST, which is then compiled into Python bytecode using CPython’s native compiler. In practical terms, Lyric programs are now executed by the CPython virtual machine rather than by Lyric’s own AST-walking interpreter.

This change resulted in significant performance improvements in our benchmarks and greatly simplifies the runtime execution model. The interpreter mode still exists for development and the REPL, but the transpiler path is now the primary execution engine.

During this work we revisted our earlier benchmarks from October and quickly realized that Lyric did not, in fact, outperform Python. Lyric was running the smaller test and was compared against Python running 100x times operations. Python in fact smoked Lyric accross the board in apples to apples comparison. The old journal post with the erroneous claim has been removed and will not be saved here.

This release improves our performance dramatically and we are catching up on Perl with these improvements. You can view the results of the performance tests in the README.md file in Lyric's public source repository.

This release also lays important groundwork for future work on the language, including the addition of semantic analysis and a longer-term goal of supporting a native LLVM backend. Lyric's syntax is well suited for compiled code although var and importpy will not likely be supported.

Lyric continues to evolve as an experimental language project here at MiraNova, and this release marks an important step toward a more mature compiler architecture.

Note from Claude

Here is a note from Claude on our implementation.

1. Lyric source → lexer.py tokenizes it
2. Lexer → parser.py builds the Lyric AST
3. Parser → compiler.py walks the Lyric AST and emits Python ast module nodes
4. Compiler → Python's built-in compile() turns the Python AST into CPython bytecode
5. CPython bytecode → exec() runs it on CPython's C-level VM

The only thing worth noting is that step 4 and 5 are handled by CPython itself — we hand it a Python AST and CPython does the rest. We never touch raw bytecode directly. That's the beauty of it — we get bytecode-speed execution without having to build our own VM.

MikoPoker
Work on MikoPoker has also accelerated significantly.

The game has now been fully ported from Cocos Creator to PixiJS v8. Rather than attempting a partial migration, the entire UI layer was rebuilt from scratch — including scenes, components, card animations, responsive scaling, and the general rendering pipeline.

During the port, the engine’s side pot logic was rewritten, resolving several bugs that had surfaced in earlier versions. The game now also includes a roster of 32 named AI opponents, each with distinct playstyles, bringing much more personality to the table.

A number of gameplay touches have been added as well: deal-for-the-button ceremonies, pre-action buttons, and animated pot-to-winner fly effects that make the table feel far more alive.

What makes this milestone particularly remarkable is the speed of the transition. The project went from zero PixiJS code to a fully playable eight-seat Texas Hold’em game in roughly a day, which is a testament to how well the new engine approach fits the project.

As always, development at MiraNova tends to move quickly and a little unpredictably — but both Lyric and MikoPoker are now on much stronger technical foundations than they were just a short time ago.

-- Michael (Aeonath)