Fix Stories: I Always Wanted to Run a Band, So I Built One

One year of weekends became a completely free browser MMO about running a band

In this Fix Stories contribution, solo developer Michal Kralovic explains how his wish to manage a band became Road to Headliner, what he used AI for, what he did not, and why building the game took a year of weekends rather than one.

Story by Michal Kralovic, solo developer of Road to Headliner.

I have always wanted to run a band. Not play in one, exactly – run one. Choose the direction, book the tour, sweat the money, feel the difference between a packed room and an empty one. I could never find a game that let me do that the way I pictured it, so a little over a year ago I decided to build it myself.

That is how Road to Headliner started, in August 2025. The idea was to manage a music career from the very bottom: start a band in a garage, write and record songs, book your first tiny show, grow a following, go on tour, and climb from a local unknown toward the top. A whole career, in the browser, in a living world shared with bands from everywhere.

Road to Headliner dashboard showing band health, finances, fans, reputation, and management tasks

The dashboard brings the band’s health, finances, reputation, fans, and upcoming management tasks into one place.

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I made one choice early that shaped everything after it: the game would be completely free. No ads, no subscription, no pay-to-win, no microtransactions. I pay for the servers and everything else myself and build it on evenings and weekends. There is no business model, and that is the point. I wanted to make the thing I wished existed and simply give it away, the way the games that shaped me were once given to me.

I should be honest about how one person builds something this size, because I think the honesty is the interesting part. I used AI, and heavily. It helped me write a large part of the code and shape a lot of the design, and it is one of the most useful tools I have ever worked with. But AI is a faster pair of hands, not a shortcut around the thinking. It does not make the thousand small decisions, it does not plan the systems, and it certainly does not fix the thing that breaks at midnight while real people are online. That part was mine, and there was a lot of it.

Road to Headliner music production screen showing song ideas and quality ratings

Song ideas move through a production pipeline before becoming demos, completed songs, and releases.

Because under the hood, this is not small. Road to Headliner runs on around a hundred database tables, a dedicated game engine that handles the economy and all the maths, a backend that ticks the entire world forward every hour, and a browser app translated into 13 languages. There are seasons, leagues, promotion and relegation, tours across 87 cities, an in-game economy, and a festival circuit, and every part of it has to keep working correctly while people are actually playing. It took a year of weekends, not one of them.

Road to Headliner tour management screen showing a multi-city concert tour

Players can plan multi-city tours, manage travel costs, and build momentum through live performances.

Since launch in March 2026, the world has grown in a way I still find a little unbelievable: more than 37,000 songs and over 29,000 live shows across 87 cities. Watching a living, competitive world take shape around something one person built in a spare room, and seeing real players from around the globe find their place in it, is a feeling that never gets old.

If there is a lesson worth passing on, it is this. Build the thing you genuinely wish existed, even if you are the only one asking for it – the care you cannot fake is the care you feel for something you would use yourself. Use every tool you can get your hands on, AI included, and then do the human part anyway: the taste, the decisions, and the stubbornness to keep going long after the exciting part is over. That is still the whole game.

I am still building it, this weekend and the next. If you have ever wanted to run a band of your own, it is free and it lives in your browser. Come and start one.