Founder & CEO, GuessWhat Labs

ColtonKeeley

I've been building games since day one of Fortnite Creative. I wrote Verse for Team Bullseye maps with over two billion plays, sold a tycoon kit Loserfruit used, and started GuessWhat Labs at sixteen.

Now I build companies.

See the work colton@coltonkeeley.com
Colton Keeley standing on a grassy ridge in front of snow-covered mountains
a.k.a. Tsar

2B+

plays on the Team Bullseye maps I worked on

50M+

plays on islands I built myself

$40K

from one tycoon kit: 20 licenses at $2,000

Day 1

of Fortnite Creative, December 2018. A week early, via the Battle Pass.

01 · Selected work

Games first. Real players, real numbers.

Almost eight years in Fortnite Creative and UEFN, from a kid building on launch day to writing Verse for some of the biggest creators in the game.

01Verse developer · UEFN

Team Bullseye

I wrote gameplay systems in Verse for one of Fortnite's biggest creator teams, including Lazarbeam collab maps commissioned through Bullseye.

  • Verse
  • UEFN
  • Gameplay systems
  • Lazarbeam collabs

2,000,000,000+

plays across the maps I worked on
02Product · Verse

The $2,000 tycoon kit

When UEFN was brand new, there was no good way to build a tycoon in it. So I built one: a drop-in Verse framework I licensed to other creators. Loserfruit used it.

  • Verse
  • Frameworks
  • Sales

20 × $2K

licenses sold
03Design · Build · Ship

My own islands

Islands I designed and shipped myself, several of them featured, including Minigame Universe and Skyhigh Box Fights.

  • Game design
  • Level design
  • Live ops

50M+

plays and counting
04Open source · MIT

ProjectOST

Then I rewrote the kit and gave it away. Add a new purchasable (droppers, conveyors, pets, money wheels, NPC spawners) in a single Verse file, with persistence, rebirths, XP and unlimited custom currencies built in.

GitHub Setup video
57GitHub stars
15forks
15K+setup video views
Purchaseables/dancefloor.verse
# Players earn cash while they emote. One file.
dancefloor_buyable<public>:=class<concrete><final>(purchaseable):

    @editable var dancefloorconfig : unique_dancefloor_buyable = unique_dancefloor_buyable{}
    var Ptype <override> : PurchaseableType = PurchaseableType.DanceFloor

    Host<override>()<suspends>:void=
        dancefloorconfig.Enable()
        loop{
            Player := dancefloorconfig.OnEmote.Await()
            race:
                dancefloorconfig.OnEmoteStop.Await()
                GrantOvertime(Player)
        }

02 · Timeline

The long way here.

I learned to code by shipping to real players. Every step below had an audience waiting on the other side.

  1. Day one in Fortnite Creative

    Creative 1.0 opened a week early for Battle Pass owners. I was building on the first day and never really stopped.

  2. Joined Maple Creates

    My first real team, and where I met Paperly. I learned to build for players instead of for myself.

  3. A full Battle Royale recreation

    Worked on a BR map recreation that shipped right before Creative 2.0. It's also how Paperly met Rubique, through our teammate Jrox.

  4. UEFN and Verse arrive

    Fortnite got a real programming language, and I went all in on it.

  5. Verse developer for Team Bullseye

    Systems for maps that passed 2 billion plays, including Lazarbeam collabs.

  6. Sold the first tycoon kit

    20 licenses at $2,000 each. Loserfruit used it. Meanwhile my own islands passed 50 million plays.

  7. Gave it all away

    TycoonKitX, then SuperKitX, then ProjectOST: free, MIT-licensed, with video guides on YouTube.

  8. Started GuessWhat Labs, Inc.

    A company that builds companies.

  9. Ladderworks, Skyline Tycoon, MyVan3D

    Plus machine-learning experiments, a Rust engine for Balatro, and a van.

03 · Now

GuessWhat Labs, Inc.

I started GuessWhat Labs to build companies, and to build the company that builds them. I'm the CEO, and I run our first venture day to day.

Ladderworks

Companies run entirely by AI agents. A founder sets a budget; an AI CEO hires the rest.

AI agents Building
Skyline Tycoon

A Fortnite city builder. Place a building, haul the crates, watch it rise. Then your citizens move in, and they have opinions.

UEFN · Verse Coming soon
MyVan3D

Spec a van conversion in a 3D viewer, the way you'd configure a Tesla. Inspired by the van I'm converting right now.

3D on the web Building
St. Augustine, Florida guesswhat.gg ↗

04 · Side builds

Other things I've built.

When something interests me, I usually end up writing an engine for it.

Automation · Markets

Trading bots

Automated trading systems I designed, built and ran myself.

$89Kmade in a year
Rust · Python

balatro-rs

A game engine and move generator for Balatro: rules engine, save-file parsing, a byte-accurate port of the game's RNG, and Python bindings for reinforcement learning.

GitHub
 TypeScript · ML

V.I.S.O.R

A modular, open-source framework for multimodal data classification that converts files into visual blueprints.

GitHub

05 · About

Hi, I'm Colton.

Most of the UEFN community knew me as Tsar. I'm seventeen, I live in St. Augustine, Florida, and I've been writing code for more than eight years.

I learned by shipping games to millions of players, which teaches you fast that nobody cares how clever your code is. They care whether it's fun, and whether it works. I bring that to everything now, from Verse to AI agents.

Lately I'm also exploring new ways to train machine-learning models efficiently, and converting a van with my girlfriend, which is how MyVan3D started.

Based in
St. Augustine, Florida
Age
17
Role
Founder & CEO, GuessWhat Labs
Also known as
Tsar
Writes
Verse, Rust, Python, TypeScript, Lua
SAT
1480 (superscore)

Let's build something.

Investors, collaborators, admissions offices and fellow Verse nerds: my inbox is open.

GitHub YouTube GuessWhat Labs