The developer behind the Katomu platform spent six months building a service for AI-driven role-playing games. Initially conceived as an anonymous chat app in February, the project underwent multiple pivots, eventually shifting focus from human-to-human interaction to AI-character roleplay.
The platform features a 'plot board' for finding roleplay partners and a reputation system that ranks users based on writing quality and interaction history. Despite these features, the developer notes that the platform has yet to reach a critical mass of users, with approximately 250 members in its Telegram channel.
The technical infrastructure evolved from SQLite to PostgreSQL to handle potential scaling. The developer implemented a clustered architecture using Redis to synchronize state across multiple application instances, ensuring that user sessions and background tasks remain consistent even under load.
Integrating AI characters required significant effort in prompt engineering and memory management to prevent models from looping or losing character consistency. The developer uses AI agents to assist in writing code, managing a codebase that has grown to nearly one million lines.
