About Surrealdente

Team

RPGLMS is designed, built, and run by one person: its founder, Dr. Dillon Augustus Simmons.

What he built

• The app. One Flutter codebase that ships to the web, iOS and Android, with progress shared across devices.Open the live demo · App Store · Google Play
• The backend on Google Cloud. A Serverpod API and a separate AI worker on Cloud Run, over Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, in separate staging and production projects defined in Terraform.How it’s built
• The AI authoring pipeline. The AI Wizard: Gemini on Vertex AI drafts a course from a teacher’s standards and sources, and every piece comes back to the teacher to revise.The pipeline · Using the Wizard
• The design system and the art. The visual language shared by the app, this site and the docs, and the direction of every landscape, creature and character in them.The gallery
• The documentation and this website. The teacher and student guides, and rpglms.com itself.Documentation

Why it’s built this way

• Every lesson starts from an objective. A course is planned from what students should be able to do, and the story is written around that, not the other way round.Wiggins & McTighe (2005) · Krathwohl (2002)
• Each step asks more of the student. A lesson is a short run of steps (Motes), and each step moves the student from taking something in, to using it, to saying what they think.Chi & Wylie (2014)
• Questions come back. Students answer each question more than once, later, and mixed in with others, because being tested teaches as well as measures.Roediger & Karpicke (2006) · Dunlosky et al. (2013)
• Progress is earned by passing. Students move on when they have shown they know the material, and they get as many tries as it takes.Kulik et al. (1990)
• Game elements are chosen, not piled on. Each game mechanic is there to support a student’s sense of choice, progress or belonging, and the ones research warns about are kept small.Ryan & Deci (2000) · Sailer & Homner (2020) · Hanus & Fox (2015)
• The story carries the lesson. Every course is set in a world with characters, because a story gives students a reason to keep going, as long as it never crowds out the content.Rowe et al. (2011) · Sailer & Homner (2020)
• The teacher decides. The AI drafts and the teacher decides, and the teacher sees enough of the class’s work to change what happens next.Black & Wiliam (1998) · Ayubian et al. (2026)

Dr. Dillon Augustus Simmons

Founder

Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, emphasis in Online Learning — Kansas State University

Dillon researches gamified intervention design, K-12 online learning, and STEM learning experiences, including a randomized controlled trial of a gamified prevention program, and co-wrote an open graduate textbook on curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Also: Grant and Research Coordinator, Rural Education Center, Kansas State University

At the Rural Education Center he has secured $4.47 million in state equipment awards through Kansas’s Advancing Digital Opportunities to Promote Technology (ADOPT) program, run by the Kansas Office of Broadband Development — 3 awards totaling $1,484,215 in 2024 and 3 awards totaling $2,985,077 in 2025 — putting tablets and Chromebooks in the hands of elementary, middle, and high school students across rural Kansas districts.

Surrealdente is an independent company. The degree, the textbook, and the grant work above belong to Dillon’s academic career — Kansas State University holds no ownership of, investment in, or endorsement of RPGLMS.

Verify the founder

• ORCID
• Kansas State University — Rural Education Center
• Kansas State University — Curriculum & Instruction

Jimmy Simmons, an interaction designer and creative director in New York, advises on AI integration, art direction, and gamification as a contractor.