Luke Robell Available for remote work worldwide
Currently building IRL MMO + IRL Guilds

Building helpful tools and creative media for the people
who live chronically online and in fantasy worlds.

I'm an AI engineer and full-stack developer building tools and creative media for the chronically online, gamers, people with ADHD, depression, and addictive personalities — meeting them in their world instead of asking them to change channels.

Self-taught. Fully remote. Published author. No degree — just shipped software, a published book edited by a clinical psychologist, and 7+ years of applied psychology research.

Get in touch IRL MMO ↗ IRL Guilds ↗
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Gaming Culture

osu! community builder, game company veteran (Black Box VR), and architecting a Unity roguelike dungeon inside IRL MMO. I understand how gamers think, play, and build community.

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Applied Psychology

7+ years studying ACT, comparative philosophy, and the psychology of ADHD, depression, and addiction. Published author. The philosophical backbone of everything I build.

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AI Engineering

6 production AI subsystems, a custom RAG pipeline, prompt architecture grounded in real behavioral science. I don't just call an API — I design how the AI thinks.

Where it started

My first job in tech was at Black Box VR — a VR fitness game startup in Las Vegas founded by Ryan DeLuca (the guy who built Bodybuilding.com into a $500M company from 20 years old) and Preston Lewis. The pitch was simple and kind of brilliant: what if a workout was actually a video game? People pushed themselves harder than they ever would in a gym because they were too busy fighting for their lives in VR to realize they were exercising.

That's when the question clicked: what if everything hard in life felt like a game worth playing? Everything I've built since — IRL MMO, IRL Guilds, the book — is an attempt to answer that.

DeLuca's a cool guy. He let me dance with his wife at the company party. 👀

Portfolio
My Work
Apps
Applications I build and maintain
IRL MMO iconIRL MMO
2025 – Present
AI-guided real-life RPG that redirects drive into values-based action

What if your real life had a quest log, a talent tree, and a life coach that actually understood your worldview? IRL MMO gamifies real-life values, habits, and goals using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy psychology and cross-worldview wisdom (Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, and more). I'm the sole engineer on the full stack — 6 AI subsystems, a custom RAG pipeline over an Obsidian knowledge vault, and a Unity Game Engine roguelike dungeon that only unlocks after you complete your real-life daily habits. It is the individual-momentum side of a product family for chronically-online gamers; IRL Guilds is the community-belonging side.

Anthropic Claude API RAG / pgvector Next.js 15 TypeScript Supabase Voyage AI Unity Game Engine Vercel LiveKit
IRL MMO ↗ Project Brief ↗ Live in production
IRL Guilds iconIRL Guilds
2026
A location-based, guild-first finder for turning online tribes into real local communities

IRL Guilds is the sister product to IRL MMO: where IRL MMO redirects drive into values-based action, IRL Guilds redirects loneliness into real-world belonging. It helps people find communities around the things they already care about, with a guild-first model, 18+ access, and city-level location fuzzing by design. Not a dating app—a way to make the kind of community that shows up for your life.

Community design Location-based discovery Safety by design Guilds & events
Explore IRL Guilds ↗ Product family
Expand to view past projects
osu!friends
June 2026
Rival matchmaking and community platform for osu! rhythm game players (open-source demo)

Competitive gaming can be isolating. osu!friends gave players rivals, tournaments, and community — without leaving the game. Automated score-sniping notifications fired directly inside osu! when a rival beat your score, and a full tournament matchmaking engine handled pairing, map pool voting, and in-game lobby invites automatically. Shipped from zero to live in 7 days; now open-source with a live demo.

Next.js 14 TypeScript Prisma Supabase NextAuth.js osu! API Vercel Cron OBS / Twitch tools
GitHub ↗ View Demo ↗ Project Brief ↗ Past project Open Source
Experience
Work History

Behavioral support, education, and remote teaching experience that informs how I build for real people.

Behavior Technician
Galliant Care · 2025
Behavioral-support experience that grounds my work in care, communication, and real individual needs.
Middle School Paraeducator
Durango School District 9-R · 2021–2022 school year
Classroom support experience built around patience, relationship-building, and adapting to different learners.
Letter of recommendation ↗
Online English Tutor
DMM Eikaiwa · May 2019–May 2021
Delivered one-on-one and group lessons remotely; designed lessons, tracked progress, gave personalized feedback, and adapted instruction to each learner.
Letter of recommendation ↗
Volunteer English Teacher
English Master, Yotsukaido-shi, Japan · March 2020
Supported middle- and high-school students preparing for university abroad through academic English, test preparation, and conversational instruction.
Capabilities
Skills
AI & Prompt Engineering Anthropic Claude API · prompt engineering · RAG pipelines · pgvector · Voyage AI · streaming SSE · structured output parsing · AI output evaluation · knowledge base curation
Full-Stack Next.js 15 (App Router, RSC, Server Actions) · TypeScript · React · Supabase · PostgreSQL · Prisma · Tailwind CSS
Infrastructure & Auth Vercel · LiveKit · Vercel Cron · Web Push API · NextAuth.js · OAuth2 (osu!, Discord, Twitch) · Node.js
Game & Interactive Unity Game Engine · C# (in development) · react-unity-webgl · OBS Browser Source · Twitch panel tooling
Human Support & Education Behavioral support · remote tutoring · 120-hour TEFL certification · lesson design · personalized feedback · learner progress assessment · classroom support · cross-cultural communication
Domain ACT psychology · gaming culture & community · ADHD / depression / addiction / OCD · comparative philosophy · AI system design
Published
Writing
Be Yourself book and tablet mockup
Read free
"Be Yourself: The Science and Spirituality of Who We Really Are"
An ACT-grounded synthesis of consciousness science and comparative religion — Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Secular Humanism. Written for people who don't fit traditional self-help: the questioning, the burned-out, the gamers who found philosophy before therapy. The intellectual foundation behind IRL MMO's prompt architecture.
Read the book free ↗
Get in touch
Contact

Open to remote roles in AI engineering, prompt engineering, RLHF evaluation, AI game design, health gaming, and AI product work. Also open to marketing roles that align with my mission. Available for freelance and contract.

lukerobell@gmail.com IRL MMO osu!friends on GitHub