Why we're building Aligned for game teams

I spent over twenty years making games, most of it at Sony Santa Monica, shipping God of War titles as a Lead Level Designer. Big-studio production is an incredible machine. There are producers whose entire craft is keeping the plan true: sitting in every review, translating every decision into tracked work, keeping Jira honest so two hundred people can trust the board.

Then I watched friends leave to start small studios, and I watched the same thing happen to almost all of them. Five brilliant people. Decades of combined experience. And the plan lives nowhere, because nobody has time to be the producer. Decisions evaporate after meetings. The design doc drifts from the backlog in week two. The whiteboard gets erased. And the person who cares most about the roadmap quietly becomes a part-time data entry clerk at night.

One studio put a number on it that I have not been able to forget: some of their people were spending around 70 percent of their time updating Jira. The game industry is under more cost pressure than it has been in a decade. Budgets are down, teams are smaller, and the one thing nobody can afford is paying senior developers to fight a web form.

The belief behind Aligned

Small teams do not fail at making games. They fail in the seam between deciding and tracking, because the translation work that big studios staff an entire discipline for lands on nobody.

That translation work is exactly the kind of thing AI is actually good at. Not designing your game. Not making creative calls. Just faithfully carrying decisions from where they happen (meetings, whiteboards, docs) into where work is tracked (Jira, Linear, Asana), with estimates, owners, and the reasoning attached, so a human only has to review instead of transcribe.

So that is what we built:

• Meetings become tickets. The planning discussion ends and the action items are already drafted.
• Whiteboard photos become backlogs. The board you erased at 3 pm is structured work by 3:05.
• Design docs become epics. The GDD and the backlog stay the same thing instead of drifting apart.
• You stay in charge. Everything is a draft until you approve it. Nothing touches your project silently.

The goal is not to add another tool to your stack. It is to delete a job nobody wanted: the unpaid producer shift after every meeting. Your team spends their time on what they are actually good at, the plan stays true anyway, and the hours you get back are runway.

Why games first

Because it is the industry I know, the network I have, and honestly, the industry that needs it most right now. Game teams generate more cross-discipline churn per decision than any software team I have seen, and small studios carry it with zero production staff. If we can make planning nearly free for a five-person game team, everything else is easy mode.

If that is your team, try it on a real goal right now. No signup. About a minute. If it does not feel like getting a teammate back, close the tab.

We are just getting started, and I want to hear what is eating your team's time. Reach out and I will read it.