I built a 16-bit RPG inside Jira, and Forge took away my server

I could not make myself log time in Jira. Not because it is hard. Because nothing happens afterwards. You type a number into a box, the box says nothing back, and by Thursday the habit is gone again. Every tool I tried fixed this by adding another box. So I built the missing half instead. Feed The Troll gives everyone on a team a pixel-art troll that gains XP from the work they already do in Jira, and turns sprint results into a village the whole project shares. It is on the Atlassian Marketplace now. This post skips the game itself. It is about five problems that turned out to be hard in ways I did not expect, each one a consequence of building the thing on Atlassian Forge, alone. What Forge gives you, and what it takes back Forge runs your code on Atlassian's infrastructure. There is no server of mine anywhere in the picture. That is the line on the listing page, and it was the single fact that shaped every decision underneath it. You get a Node 22 runtime, Forge SQL (TiDB under the hood) for storage, and Custom UI modules that reach the backend through @forge/bridge . You give up a backend you control, a cache you can reach, and outbound HTTP to anything you did not declare. The one that keeps mattering: any way to open the database at three in the morning and fix a single row by hand. The whole app declares six scopes. None of them are write scopes: read:board-scope:jira-software read:issue-details:jira read:jira-work read:jira-user read:sprint:jira-software storage:app That last line is the entire persistence layer. Twenty-one tables live behind it now, but only ten shipped with v1.0: trolls, XP events, daily activity, kudos, quests, inventory, team quests, villages, raids, project settings. Every table added since arrived the only way the platform makes comfortable, as a new migration appended to the list, never an edit to one already deployed. migrationRunner . enqueue ( ' v001_create_trolls ' , CREATE_TROLLS_TABLE ) // ... . enqueue ( ' v012_create_product_m