Four days, one valley.My most ambitious project

Before the jam

The workshop, not the game

• Unreal Engine 5.8
• Blender 5.2
• Gitea
• Claude Code

Before November 12, only the workshop existed: Unreal Engine 5.8 and Blender set up so agents could drive them, a private Git server with a build runner, and scripts to run the editor without a screen.

Director's note

Get the tools out of the way first, so four days go into the game.

Day 1 · Thursday, Nov 12

Foundations in one day

• DevQA
• AI arena
• endless-data
• Economy simulator
• Lore validator
• Animation pipeline
• Mixamo
• Docker dev-slim
• Codex · Astra

Six repositories were created at 9:34 in the morning. Everything started on a plain grey test map: by night it already had a dedicated server, accounts, a backpack, combat and death.

• A QA harness: scripted play sessions with screenshots and video, run by the build server on every push
• Art direction explored before deciding: 7 UI directions, 4 rounds of character style and 28 batches of character concepts, until the look of the game was locked
• 149 animation clips retargeted to one skeleton, with the locomotion graph generated by script
• Server-authoritative movement with rate limits per input channel
• Accounts, sessions, characters and an audit trail for every item
• Melee, bows and spells, full loot, the ghost and resurrection
• The AI arena: bot brains, win rates and Elo, and the first balance passes
• The world bible, checked line by line by an originality review: that is when the valley got its name, Semfim

Director's note

Infrastructure before features. Nothing an agent makes counts until a verifier rebuilds it from a clean copy.

Day 2 · Friday, Nov 13

The valley goes live

• Fly.io
• One-command deploy
• Platform
• Blender kits
• Niagara
• Meshy

The public server went up in São Paulo, and the whole 1 km² valley became the map you play on.

• Public server, platform and database live
• A quest engine on the server, the quest book and the Arcane Tower building site
• A modular building kit with roofs that cut away when you walk inside
• Creatures of tiers 2 to 5 and more characters
• Music by zone, sound effects tied to every visual effect, and the credits screen
• The interface skins: Codex and Slate

Director's note

Ship the whole valley rough rather than one pretty corner.

Day 3 · Saturday, Nov 14

A town with people in it

• Platform: commerce
• Dungeon and furniture kits
• Poly Haven · ambientCG
• Meshy · Rodin · Tripo

The valley got its economy and its townsfolk.

• Fishing, the bank, NPC shops, player trade and the PK title
• Dungeon interiors: the Crypt, the Lair, the Hill Grotto, the Deep Burrow and the Old Mouth mine
• Villagers with routines: they sit, drink, toast, dance, gossip and work the anvil
• The town square with its fountain and linden tree, and building sites with six builders
• Login and character screens
• Ore in every mineable ground

Director's note

A town feels alive when its people are busy, not when it is crowded.

Day 4 · Sunday, Nov 15

Forest, voices and votes

• Nature placement
• Rodin · Tripo
• Nano Banana
• Claude for NPCs
• Cloudflare Pages
• Metrics script

The last day went into the world and the people in it, and into telling everyone about it.

• 94 nature pieces and a dense forest of about 37,000 instances, where every tree gives wood
• 198 props and the crafting stations, from Astra's art
• Doors with locks, shops with opening hours and dungeon chests that persist
• Community voting with public results
• NPC conversation through Claude, with a real daily budget, and the Journal with trust per character

Director's note

Cut what won't be ready, mark what comes next, and say so plainly.