Andre

It is out! 🙉 I can’t quite believe I’m typing that. Four weeks ago, we picked a goal: about an hour of game, the Prologue and Episode 1. The story starts where Chronicles Series 2 ends. The Diamond Fleece shatters at a festival, and Katana goes after the pieces. I thought I would share a bit more about how it got made, and what it cost. How we built it It is a full 3D game that runs in your browser. No download, no app store. Phone, tablet, laptop. I didn’t build it the usual way. I worked as the director, with AI agents doing the engineering: Claude leading and integrating, Codex taking smaller jobs. My job was to play every single build and say exactly what was wrong. “The bamboo goes through his hat.” “Why is Bjørn standing in Oda’s arena?” “The fire hides Katana.” That list is at 547 entries. Five hundred and forty-seven times I said “no, not like that”. Test builds have landed at 5 in the morning. I’ve fought Bjørn more times than I have done anything else this month, and I still flinch at his sweep. We went through 107 versions to get here. Levels went paper, then pictures, then grey boxes, then art, and nothing got painted until I had walked it on foot and signed it off. Lore came first, always. Every line was checked against the Chronicles. Oda stays the Butcher, atoning. Michi stays blunt. Who struck the Fleece stays a mystery, on purpose. What we learned (the hard way) Phones are brutal. An iPhone 14 Pro just reloads the page at about 1 GB of memory, mid-fight, no warning. Every scene now has to stay under roughly 550 MB or it doesn’t ship. Some of the hardest weeks went into things you will never see. Write every mistake down once. Each problem I caught became a rule, and about half of them now have an automatic check. There are 253 rules now, and they’re why build 107 is so much better than build 7. Listen. People told us “it is only in English.” So it now runs in nine languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic. What’s next I should sleep. I won’t. Episode 2 is already playable in my test builds, and it is the most fun I have had making something in years. But first, play this one and tell us what breaks. Every report gets read. Huge thanks to @TimpersHD for the world and the characters, and to the @ChimpersHQ team for trusting us with them.