Greetings, Forge community, and welcome to the twenty-sixth edition of our Stars of the VTT Galaxy series! This ongoing interview series celebrates the brilliant minds shaping the world of TTRPGs, from artists and musicians to mapmakers and developers.
In this special Part 1 of our interview, we’re featuring someone whose work has transformed how thousands of players run their games. We are thrilled to sit down with Youness Alaoui, better known as KaKaRoTo, a software engineer, open-source advocate, and the founder of The Forge, as well as the mastermind behind Beyond20.
From pioneering game-changing tools to crafting some of Foundry’s most beloved modules, his contributions have helped countless GMs and players bring their tabletop adventures to life with ease.
But KaKaRoTo’s journey goes far beyond VTTs. With a deep-rooted passion for open-source development, an innovative mindset, and a relentless drive to improve the digital tabletop experience, his influence extends across multiple projects.
In this first segment, we explore KaKaRoTo’s personal journey, his career in software development, and his pivotal contributions to The Forge and Foundry VTT. Join us as we uncover his story - diving into his background, his groundbreaking work, and the vision that has shaped The Forge into what it is today.
Our sky consists of many stars. Each of them illuminating our planet. As you can guess, the stars are you. Yes, it's you, the great content creators who, in your own unique way, shine on our worlds. Thank you for being part of our heavenly sky and weaving the fabric of our Community.
Let's meet today's star.
Personal & Career Journey
Hi KaKaRoTo!
Welcome to our interview series, Stars of the VTT Galaxy.😊
I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time, and I’m sure the community has too! So, thank you for taking the time to do this interview.
Let’s start simple - How are you doing? With everything happening in the world right now, I can't help but ask you this.
KaKaRoTo: Hi, and thanks for having me! Thank you also for starting with this question, though I doubt my answer will be a simple one.
I’m not gonna lie, the last year and a half has been the most challenging of my life. As we are bearing witness to the Holocaust of the Palestinians on a daily basis, it’s hard to feel anything but a deep depression and a loss of hope for humanity as a whole. I’m both mentally and physically burnt out, but seeing the people in the streets fighting every day against fascism and imperial colonialism does give me hope for a future where humanity can prevail.
While I’m not doing ok, I know that I’m still very much privileged compared to so many others suffering around the world, so I can’t complain, and I can only use them as my models for strength and resilience, and continue fighting so their voices can be heard.
For those who might not be familiar (if those people exist in the community🙂), can you give a quick introduction about who you are and what you do?
KaKaRoTo: I’m a software developer who loves to poke at things and figure out how they work. I also love using my skills to democratize access to technology, bridging the gap between the tech and the less tech-savvy people, and trying to give them access to tools they would otherwise not be able to use.
My entire life has been dedicated to free and open source technologies, from working on aMSN Messenger, to the PS3 hacking scene, to the development of R20Converter and Beyond20, as well as many popular Foundry VTT modules (The Furnace, LMRTFY, Polyglot, PopOut!, Trigger Happy, etc…), and finally to founding The Forge!
Nowadays, my role has changed from software development to management of the company, but I still sometimes get to have some fun and write code.
What’s one random fact about you?
KaKaRoTo: I have two adorable bunnies at home.🐰🐇
Also, my profile picture is a photo of me when I was 3 months old. It's the only photo of mine that I actually like 😂.
You’ve worked on so many different projects over the years. If you had to describe yourself in just three words, what would they be?🙂
KaKaRoTo: Attention Deficit Hacker.
Your journey has taken you from programming, through hacking PlayStations to building a top-tier VTT hosting service. Looking back, did you ever imagine your career would take this path? If you could travel back to meet your younger self and tell him what you’re doing now, what do you think his reaction would be?
KaKaRoTo: No, I never imagined it would take this path. I like to describe myself as an accidental entrepreneur because this was completely unexpected and not what I would have wished for myself.
My younger self would laugh at me (in disbelief) because, for years, I always said that I did not want to have a business, and I was very content being a regular employee somewhere.
You’ve had an extensive background in open-source development, from aMSN to 3D printing software. What is it about software engineering that keeps you so passionate, even after decades of work?
KaKaRoTo: I love helping people and hate wastefulness. The open source community is one of the best out of there and its entire purpose is to give access to people to tools that they otherwise might not have access to. By sharing with one another, we lift each other up and by re-using code, we eliminate that wastefulness where each proprietary software solution needs to keep re-inventing the wheel.
I think the fact that throughout my life, I’ve switched from one project to another, often in very different domains, has helped keep me passionate about what I’m working on. There’s just so much knowledge to be gained, so it’s always going to be fun to learn new things.
Let’s say you’re at a convention, and someone recognizes you as KaKaRoTo. What’s the most common thing people ask or say to you?
KaKaRoTo: I have to admit that it’s happened a few times, and I don’t remember that there was anything people tend to ask, but rather they just want to thank me for one tool or another.
Where does the inspiration come from in the work you do? Or perhaps, your “muse”?
KaKaRoTo: That’s a great question!
I’m always my own “muse”, lol! More specifically, it’s always easier to work on something when you need it for yourself, so most of my open-source contributions or projects I’ve taken on over the years have been about fulfilling one of my own personal needs. It’s not that hard to juggle a user-requested feature with a feature you yourself need, but for the most part, that development has been driven by own needs.
As I said above, you’ve contributed to countless open-source projects, many of which improved accessibility or usability. Do you see your work with The Forge as a natural extension of that philosophy?
KaKaRoTo: It is an extension of that philosophy, but not quite. The Forge is a tool/service that’s meant to bring access to Foundry to the masses by making it more easily accessible and usable, so in that aspect, it is an extension of that work from my past.
However, as opposed to the other projects I’ve built throughout my life, The Forge is not an open-source project and it’s an actual business, so it’s also definitely a departure from my past. That being said, I did open-source some portions of the work we’ve done, and we’ve always been about the user first, rather than being about profit first, which is unfortunately not as common as one might think.
You discovered Dungeons & Dragons in 2018, yet it quickly became a huge part of your life. What was it about TTRPGs that hooked you so deeply, and how did that transform your life/future?
KaKaRoTo: I remember when I first decided to play D&D, and we got a group together and started playing. I was the DM because nobody else volunteered, and it was a stressful job but we always had so much fun that I always wanted to do better every week, and I guess that’s how I got hooked… Thinking about how far I could take the immersion and how good of a collective storytelling session we could have.
I’ve also always been an introvert with very few friends, so this allowed me to expand my social circle and start having actual interactions with human beings, so that was fun too, lol.
The Forge & Foundry VTT
What does a typical day look like for you as the founder of The Forge? Is it mostly coding, problem-solving, or putting out fires?🙂
KaKaRoTo: Good question! It’s neither! 🤣 I do sometimes have to put out some fires, but that’s not that common.
For the most part, my day starts by checking my emails. I tend to receive 100 or so emails every day (most of them are alerts, notifications from our monitoring systems, or spam, so easy to dismiss). I will glance at my inbox for anything that stands out, then I will check my Discord mentions (I tend to get between 3 and 10 a day) for anything urgent, then I go back to my emails, finish passing through/responding to them, then I go back to Discord to check all the channels (where I wasn’t mentioned) for anything I need to watch out for, and I respond to anything I feel is worth a response.
That tends to take me 3 to 4 hours, and then my real work day starts, which is usually either filled with meetings with people from the team, or admin work (filing sales tax, paying invoices, calling the accountant, reviewing employment contracts, or labor laws), and then, assuming I’m not completely wiped out, I’ll check on the project for anything where my input is needed, either responding to tickets or writing code or managing our servers. It’s a boring and very stressful job, and I honestly hated it for a long time but I’ve grown to like it now, or at least I’m at peace with the change of my role.
That being said, a lot of my work in the past couple of years has been to delegate most of my tasks and hire people to tackle all of those aspects so I can lower my workload. The hope is to eventually have enough “free time” to be able to contribute a lot more to the programming aspects of the job, though most of my free time lately has just been used to get a bit of a breather and recover some energy from my long term exhaustion. It's also been very difficult lately to contribute in any meaningful way while at the same time spending most of my waking hours doing activism work in the real world.
The Forge is widely considered the best hosting service for Foundry VTT. When you first launched it, did you expect it to become such a staple of the community?
KaKaRoTo: That’s funny because the answer is both, yes and no. 🤣
When I started The Forge, I had grand plans, and I thought I could take on the world and it could become the number one competitor to Roll20 and the place to go for playing TTRPG games, but let’s be honest, I had delusions of grandeur, lol.
I'm always like that though, when I start a project, I always think of the possibilities, and I think about it in terms of “Why would someone not use this?”, and if I can find an answer to that question, I’d change things to eliminate it until I can’t think of a reason why people wouldn’t be using it (other than not knowing about it, and I hate marketing stuff, so I don’t care about that issue at that point 🤷♂️).
That being said, never in a million years would I have imagined the growth and success of The Forge. There’s a big difference between thinking that your project has the promise of being great and actually seeing that promise get fulfilled.
There’s also a very big element to consider, I released The Forge as an early preview beta to my Patrons on February 18th, 2020… Basically, a couple of weeks before the whole COVID isolation/shut-down happened on a global scale, and that had a huge impact on the growth of the VTT scene and particularly The Forge.
While I think that I delivered a good product that people wanted, there is no denying that the vast majority of The Forge’s success can be attributed to luck and timing and things that are beyond our control. I definitely feel blessed to be in this position today.
Looking back at The Forge’s journey, what was the biggest challenge in building it, and how did you overcome it?
KaKaRoTo: I think the biggest challenge was the pacing of development and the stress factor.
When I launched The Forge, I found myself in an extreme financial crisis, and so this project of mine, which I had been developing for a few months and had planned on releasing (for the most part) as a free service, had to suddenly become my primary focus, and I pivoted into making it a viable business.
As I said above, it also coincided with COVID so my initial 5 users became 10, became 20, became 100, became 1000… in a very short period of time, and I was left scrambling non stop in order to make it work at scale. There were so many technologies that I had to learn all at once and juggle everything on my own.
The more users I gained, the more stressed I became, because I felt the responsibility of delivering on my promise to even more people, and because the more users you have, the more issues you find and race conditions and all sorts of scaling issues.
That whole period of my life feels like a blur, to be honest, but I remember that I would wake up and basically run from the bed to the PC and start working in a sort of adrenaline-fueled haze for 16 or 18 hours straight until I would collapse, then drag myself back to bed. And I was doing that 7 days a week for at least the first 9 to 10 months. At some point, I had to actually set an alarm and reserve a 30-minute chunk in my day just to see my family, and that was all the time I was allowed “off the keyboard” in the day.
The sudden growth didn’t let me take it slow, and the pace of development was incredibly hard to keep up, and I was expecting to burn out any second, but I kept it up for about two and a half years, slowly bringing my hours from the “18 hours average a day, 7 days a week” to “14 hours a day, 7 days a week” to “12 hours a day, 5 days a week”.
I think I had my first day off after a year when I started taking my weekends off. It was very hard to go back to living a normal life, being with my family, and not being constantly coding and doing tech support and monitoring servers, etc…
I remember it took me a while to get accustomed to it and every time I would sit down to watch a movie with my wife, or just taking the weekend off, something felt off, and I was physically unwell because “something is wrong!”, until I realized that it was the fact that my fingers were not typing on a keyboard that just felt unnatural to me… Practically a form of PTSD, lol. I had to reacclimate myself to being a human being again, basically.
After a year, I hired DestinyGrey as an assistant and he started to take on some of my tasks, then I hired some developers, and slowly but surely, we built a company with now nearly 20 staff members. By the second year, I was doing only 80 hours per week of work, which slowly went down to about 60 and then on the third year, I was finally doing a more normal 40 hours a week.
How did I overcome it? Pure strength of will to be honest (and a little bit lot of insanity). There is, however, one event I vividly remember, in which the servers went down for multiple hours while I was asleep and nobody knew how to reach me. When I woke up, and I saw that the worst-case scenario had happened (I used to wake up very often every night to check my phone in case something happened, but I had stopped doing that at some point), I thought I was finished, I thought I was in my nightmare scenario and that I would be lynched by all the users.
However, while some people were understandably and justifiably frustrated, the vast majority of feedback and messages I received were messages of love and understanding. I realized at that point that I was setting unrealistic expectations of myself and thinking that everyone was setting the same unrealistic expectations of me, but in reality, we’re all human beings and while it’s not fun for anyone to miss a game due to technical issues, the users understood that I was doing my best and that “sh*t happens”. That helped me put things into perspective and it considerably lowered my stress levels.
Afterward, we also set up a system so I could always be reached in case of a problem, and that allowed me to go to sleep without stressing over what might happen because I knew that my moderators were on top of things and would wake me up if I was needed.
Also, hiring people to take on more and more of my tasks was definitely a big factor in overcoming all of that, of course. So a huge shoutout to all of The Forge’s team! Thank you a thousand times for making The Forge what it is today and allowing me to keep the little bit of sanity I have left! 💚
What’s a feature of The Forge that you are most personally proud of, and what’s one that was the hardest to implement?
KaKaRoTo: The feature I’m most proud of is, without a doubt, the Game Manager. It was initially the idea that sparked the creation of The Forge. Back then, I was very annoyed by Foundry’s system of having to “Return to setup” every time to switch between worlds, so I thought that I could probably set up a system to do that automatically based on the URL.. And that eventually led to needing to host Foundry which is where The Forge became a hosting platform for Foundry VTT, but the original idea was just the ability to switch worlds based on the URL you use to access Foundry, the rest was just sort of a necessary pre-requisite for that feature to work, lol.
I think the hardest feature to implement was the Save Points feature. It took so much longer to achieve than I was hoping for, and that was because of the technical challenges that came with it (and I’m still not fully happy with the implementation of it on the backend side).
Initially, I was using a private git repository to keep track of changes of my world between sessions, and that was my way of achieving what I was doing on Roll20, which was a clone of the campaign before and after each session (remember when I said that my muse is my own personal needs? 😜). For my local Foundry installation, committing the changes to a private git was fine, but at scale, it’s impossible, so I had to find alternative ways to achieve that, and it was a challenge that took over a year I believe before we settled on a solution that works.
If we look at you as The Forge, we can say that, in some way, you have a huge influence on how people experience Foundry VTT. How do you balance the challenge of providing a seamless hosting service while staying true to Foundry’s flexibility and customizability?
KaKaRoTo: The truth is that it’s not easy to balance the two, because Foundry VTT has a certain way that it works, and it’s following a specific vision, which is very different from the vision that I have for how I’d like Foundry VTT to work.
On top of that, we can’t change the core Foundry software or change the experience too much from what Foundry wants it to be, otherwise, we’d just be confusing users, so it’s a difficult juggling act, and I think the approach of trying to abstract things from the users as much as possible and building services and tools on top of Foundry that are external to it, has been helpful and works well.
The Foundry VTT is always evolving, especially with major version updates like V12. How you & your team are keeping up with those rapid changes while maintaining stability for users?
KaKaRoTo: The team has been doing an amazing job of tackling these ever-evolving versions of Foundry. Some of them have been smoother than others, but nearly every version introduces changes that are in some way incompatible with what we’re trying to do at The Forge. This means that we have to work harder in order to work around the issue and provide our users with the experience they want, and without losing any of our existing features.
It has happened in the past when we were working on some feature for a while and then an update to Foundry was released, and it completely blocked the path forward, and we had to abandon months of work because there was no way forward. Thankfully, so far, all existing features, we’ve found one way or another to keep them, as I never wanted to take away a feature that users might have already gotten accustomed to.
The biggest example is the Foundry v11 change from nedb to leveldb which required a huge amount of work, as well as the mandatory database migration which affected launching Foundry v12 on the Forge in ways we didn’t anticipate.
What is your vision for the future of The Forge?
KaKaRoTo: Ahh, you want to know all the secrets! 😜
My original vision for the Forge has already been achieved, which makes me quite happy and proud of that accomplishment. Throughout the years though, that vision has changed and more ideas took shape, on how we can make things easier and better for the community and our players.
Besides the vision for future features, I think we need to first complete our implementations of our existing features which still need improvements. A long standing issue which we’ve been working on for a long time is the Bazaar, which we’re not yet done with its overhaul. Our D&D Beyond integration is also lagging behind and we want to concentrate on finalizing that implementation.
We’re also working behind the scenes on other exciting new features and products which I think for now, I’ll keep secret, but let’s just say that I’m excited to see what the future holds for The Forge 😁.
I hope you are too 😉!
And that brings part 1 of our interview to a close, but the adventure is far from over! In part 2, we’ll dive into KaKaRoTo’s game-changing modules, the creation of Beyond20, his passion for open source, and the challenges and dreams that lie ahead for The Forge and our beloved community.
Follow along - we can’t wait to share the rest with you!
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