ERVEN.BUILD · R&D LOG
Full-cycle prototyper 0-to-1 · rapid prototyping · Figma, Unity, Unreal Every clock stamped where you can check it

Marisa Erven

R&D · Creative Technologist · Art & Technical Direction

I build the thing the same day I meet the problem. Every entry below is a real product born from a real friction. One person runs the whole 0-to-1 loop: concept, architecture, prototyping, build, artistic and technical direction, and the story of the solve. Nothing gets lost in a handoff.

The build log

Problem → Built → Shipped → Proves
Two symmetry drawings made in LuxFlo on a near-black ground: a green and gold burst of looping strokes on the left, and on the right a woven ring of violet, lime and coral bands around a small coral center.
LE VERE, INC. SHIPPED OCT 19 2026

LuxFloGenerative symmetry sketching, made for concepting

The problem

A blank page asks you to know the shape before you draw it, and drawing tools are built for a desk, not a stage. Concepting moves faster with something on the page to react to, and a live performance has no way to make the image while the audience watches.

What got built

A browser sketching instrument where one mark blooms through radial symmetry and mirror into a form you did not have to plan. Calligraphic and round brushes, a stabilize dial, spectrum color, a lasso fill, and an Overlap control that renders the arms flat, glowing, or folded into negative space like a cut-paper snowflake. Voice mode makes the voice the brush. As a song or a spoken-word piece unfolds, the voice sculpts and draws the image in real time: pitch sets hue and brightness, volume sets weight, and timbre roughens the edge. The performance and the picture are made in the same breath, in front of the room, and no two are alike.

luxflo.app →
Screenshot of The Hat Shoppe: the shop interior with hats on a wooden counter and shelf, the Work the block action below, and the day, purse and clientele counters above.
T-5 DAYS SIREN COVE STUDIOS SHIPPED OCT 13 2026

The Hat ShoppeCozy millinery clicker: craft, curation, provenance

The problem

Shop games give you the rhythm of making and selling. A hat shop lets you make something, trim it however you like, and set it in the window for the right person to fall in love with.

What got built

A small millinery kept well: a day counter, a purse, passers-by at the window, and five tabs (Shoppe, Window, Ledger, Workroom, Atelier). The core verb is working felt over a block until it becomes a hat, then closing up for the night. Sibling domain hatshopgame.com redirects in.

hatshoppegame.com →
Screenshot of Make Spin Art in Blacklight mode: the headline A little paint. All you. above a spinning disc swirled in cyan, blue and magenta, with the paint cup and colour palette on the left and the Presets and Dials panel on the right.
T-2 DAYS NO ACCOUNTS NO TRACKING SHIPPED OCT 12 2026

Make Spin ArtA browser studio where paint behaves like paint

The problem

Spin art is physical joy that does not survive being turned into a web toy; the paint never behaves.

What got built

A browser studio where paint is simulated as paint: ridges, drips flung into droplets, pooling at the rim under spin. Every piece exports as a signed, numbered, dated card with no account behind it.

Proves

Provenance without identity. A piece is signed by its maker and numbered as a specific object, and the site never needs to know who the maker is. The number is derived from the piece itself, a hash of the exact spin, so the same artwork always carries the same number and a re-export reproduces it. The signature is the maker's own name, and the whole record lives on the device with nothing sent anywhere.

makespinart.com →
Screenshot of the Kindly home page: the headline Protect your peace. Curate your feed. beside an illustrated phone showing a smiling heart among leaves and clouds, with the buttons Let’s take a small step and I need a moment.
T-1 DAY NO ACCOUNTS WORD OF MOUTH ONLY SHIPPED OCT 09 2026

KindlyProtect your peace. Curate your feed.

The problem

More of the internet runs live now, and live means unchosen: when something terrible happens, feeds deliver it in realtime to people who never decided to watch. Kindly gives the controls back, platform by platform: the exact toggles and mute words that quiet any feed, and plain permission to look away when filters fall short.

What got built

A no-account, no-tracking site under the line “Protect your peace. Curate your feed,” served from one Worker with six companion domains (youcanlookaway.com, youdonthavetowatch.com and .org, yourscreenyourchoice.com and .org) redirecting in. Shipped October 9, 2026, the evening of the announcement that put a livestreamed execution on the public calendar for the first time in ninety years.

Proves

Readers stay. More than 160 visits in the second week at three to four pages per visit, with no notification, no sign-up, and nothing asking anyone to return.

youcanlookaway.org →
Screenshot of the Tending home page: the headline Grief changes shape. You don’t have to carry it evenly. beside a soft watercolor of a watering can, butterflies, leaves and a sun behind clouds, with the buttons Let’s take a small step and I need a moment.
T-1 DAY NO ACCOUNTS NO TRACKING SHIPPED OCT 09 2026

Tending Your GriefA grief resource read evenly on phones and desktops

The problem

A grieving person often can't read, remember, or decide much in the first weeks, yet that's when the calls, paperwork, and dates arrive. The support they're given needs the very things grief takes away.

What got built

A multi-page site read evenly on phones and desktops. No accounts, no tracking. Shipped October 9, 2026.

Proves

Answer engines treat it as a source before anyone has promoted it. In its first week it drew more AI-crawler reads than any other domain in the portfolio, 293 of 392 verified-bot requests.

tendingyourgrief.com →
Screenshot of the Cozy Clicker home page: the title over the line Small games about collecting things, with two game cards, Kitty Clicks (The number goes up) and Glitter n’ Dust (The number goes down), each with a Play now link.
T-1 DAY SIREN COVE STUDIOS NO ACCOUNTS SHIPPED AUG 11 2026

Cozy ClickerSmall browser games that move at your pace: tending, brewing, baking, collecting. No download, no account, no hurry.

The problem

Clickers run on the player not noticing: timers, ads, purchases that buy better luck. Cozy Clicker keeps the gentle part and removes the coercion.

What got built

Hand-drawn games, each a single HTML file with zero dependencies, saving quietly in your own browser. Two live, every pixel by one person.

Proves

Organic pull across the line. A steady 30 visits a week, and it quietly feeds its sibling: seven visits walked from Cozy Clicker to Kitty Clicks in one week with no link between the two.

cozyclicker.com →
Screenshot of Kitty Clicks showing the pettable cat at the centre, the cat friends and gift box panels on the left, and the Pet Shoppe upgrade list on the right.
T-3 DAYS SIREN COVE STUDIOS SHIPPED AUG 10 2026 · SEASONAL RELEASES LIVE

Kitty ClicksCozy idle clicker: retention without pressure

The problem

Most idle games monetize restlessness. There was room for one that rewards softness: a game that winds a player down instead of up.

What got built

A cozy idle clicker designed and shipped end-to-end as a solo build under the Siren Cove Studios mark: game loop, art direction, and release.

Proves

Retention without a hook. Eighteen players across eight countries and 42 browsers holding a save. A score rises only while the game is open, and the top player is past 895 billion pets and still climbing, with a newcomer who reached fifth within 48 hours. No notification, streak, email, or promotion behind any of it.

kittyclicks.com →
Screenshot of Glitter n' Dust showing the daylight meter, a rock at the cliff face waiting to be broken down, and side panels for today's bag, rubble and screens, the rock tumbler, and the minerals collection.
T-2 DAYS SIREN COVE STUDIOS SOLO LIVE AUG 08 2026

Glitter n' DustPush-your-luck rockhounding, inverted clicker

The problem

Idle games manufacture tension with random punishment: the shatter, the lost streak, the dice that betray you. It works, and it teaches players to blame the game. There was room for a loss condition that couldn't be blamed on anything but a choice.

What got built

A full economy on day one: daylight as the resource and dusk as the pressure, a bag that banks only when you pack up and camp, named sites with their own yields, real mineralogy delivered as discovery cards, offline accrual in the washing screens and the tumbler, and a collection wall across five categories.

Proves

Systems design with a thesis: the loss is opportunity cost, not randomness. Follow one fault or vein and every other falls away permanently. Commitment-regret retains better than punishment-fear, and geological fidelity does the teaching for free.

30 to 60 visits a week, all direct, flat to rising since August.

glitterndust.com →
Screenshot of STARLITE showing a dark-sky map of the western United States with Bortle-rated pins, an open field-condition card for Death Valley National Park listing cell signal, elevation, temperatures and hazards, and the gear panel calculating an NPF shutter limit.
T-3 HRS GOOGLE BUILD EVENT SOLO SHIPPED AUG 06 2026

STARLITEDark-sky field intelligence: seven systems on one surface

The problem

Prepping one night of star photography meant stitching intel from 5 to 10 sources: Bortle maps, weather, cell coverage, elevation, hazards. Half a day per trip, and the surprises still got through.

What got built

One surface: a Bortle-rated dark-sky map, field-condition cards (signal, temps, fog behavior, hazards), an AI location & gear guide, and a gallery where every photo carries its camera settings and source credit.

Proves

The full cycle runs at lab speed on a cold surface: three hours, concept to working build.

A steady 30 to 35 visits a week since launch, almost all direct, with the first search arrivals (Bing, Google) appearing in October. A known audience returning on its own.

starliteapp.com →
A stage lit in red and teal, with a hard diagonal shear running through the structure where two lighting states meet in the same frame.
T-1 NIGHT SOLO METHOD FRAMES AUG 2026

GlitchSweepGenerative capture: the stitcher's reasoning, made visible

The problem

Event photography flattens the one thing a production spends its budget on. A single frame holds a single lighting state, but the show is the transitions. Standard coverage records what the stage looked like. It cannot record what it was doing.

What got built

A capture method rather than a photograph. A panoramic sweep runs across a stage cycling faster than the sweep completes, so the stitcher assembles slices captured under lighting states that cannot coexist and fails to reconcile them. The seam is the output.

Role

Originated the method. Shot the series. Not a filter and not a fix applied afterward. A condition set up on purpose so the failure mode becomes the image.

Proves

The same operation as every entry above, pointed at a camera: set a condition, let something else generate the material, then read what comes back. Judgment applied to a surface the maker did not construct. 50 visits in the last 30 days with no promotion. Small, and true.

glitchsweep.build →
Screenshot of The Department of Connections showing a force-directed graph of structure and domain nodes, with a side panel opened on Boolean algebra listing the six domains it connects to.
T-7 DAYS SOLO SHIPPED JUL 24 2026

The Department of ConnectionsCross-domain knowledge graph

The problem

The load-bearing structures under separate fields (music, math, ecology, law) rhyme constantly, but nothing maps the rhymes. The connective tissue between domains stays invisible.

What got built

A living knowledge graph mapping shared structure across 50 domains, so a pattern found in one field can be walked into all of its neighbors.

Proves

Concept to live domain in seven days, without handoffs.

deptofconnections.org →
Screenshot of the LE VERE website showing the app icon and the line “Start with one item. See what it reveals.”
FLAGSHIP LE VERE, INC. SOLO FOUNDER ANGEL FUNDED iOS + ANDROID SHIPPED JUN 2026

LE VEREPersonal property vault: inheritance infrastructure on modern rails

The problem

What people own, and what it means, lives in shoeboxes, camera rolls, and memory. When insurance, estates, or disaster strike, the record isn't there.

What got built

A structured property vault: mobile capture, attributes and documents, multi-space and multi-member sharing, clean export. The soft launch build passed Apple's human review on first submission.

Role

Technical director · Art director · UI/UX director. Built the initial fully functional prototype, then directed external developers.

Proves

The engine that every build below reskins: capture, structure, export.

levere.app →

On the record

Facts, dated, checkable

Build with Gemini, Seattle. STARLITE built onsite in three hours and submitted for feature consideration.

Advanced-track presenter, Seattle Tech Week. Claude Code workshop segment: 85 in the room, 400+ on livestream, named in the host's public post alongside Anthropic's community team. Recording public.

The New York Times. Signatory to the "Hollywood Heavyweights" letter opposing Paramount's deal for Warner Bros., cited in ongoing coverage.

SH//FT: The Next 10 Years of Creative Tech and Futurism. Keynote speaker and panelist, Ceres Robotic Lab, Palo Alto.

Rapid Prototyping in XR. Speaker, UW XRA 2025 Speaker Series, University of Washington.

National Science Foundation. External advisory board, Advanced Technical Education project, Applied Technologies Division, Coastal Alabama Community College.

How I work

The pattern is the product. I find the load-bearing structure under a problem fast, and I build straight at it, which is how an idea becomes a working product in an afternoon instead of a quarter.

Prototyping in Figma, Unity, and Unreal. Adobe Creative Cloud and Substance for the art. Whatever the problem actually needs.

No traditional pipeline produced this. A creative-writing spine, a systems eye, and a refusal to have the same problem twice. The log above is the résumé.