At a few minutes past midnight I put the headset on, connected over Wi-Fi, and typed "connected, now what?" Then, a few minutes later: "everything looks perfect." I typed it again twenty minutes after that, because it was true. There was a room with a table and a ball. It followed my head. The only flaw was the shadow of my hands on the floor, which looked pixelated. I wrote that it was "okish" and meant it kindly.
A tall man at a desk
Then the real world arrived. I am 176 cm tall and I was sitting at my office desk. The ball on the virtual table was out of reach because the game thought I was standing. The teleport would not go through the door, maybe because I am tall. I said I would need a mode for sitting down, and within the hour there was one, and it remembers my height between sessions. Grabbing and throwing by pointing worked. That small, silly fix, for a man in a chair, taught me what the project is really about: it has to work for a body in a room, not for an ideal player.
I built the first layers one at a time, each with a fresh assistant, saying "I will move to a new agent, is everything needed recorded?" It was like passing a baton in a relay where every runner has no memory.
The question that changed the plan
Around two in the night I asked a question that changed the plan: will a world always be a village with different settings? What about a cyberpunk city, a dwarven dungeon, a wild west heist? The answer became the heart of the game. An AI would write each world's settings before play, taking as many minutes as it needed. A second, faster one would make small decisions during play so every run feels unique. And the jump between worlds should be seamless. I wrote:
Open the door and it is a portal. Just walk through, no special effect.
The first try was not seamless. I saw the room for one second and then everything went black. Moving a little made the world appear. There was a slow drift back to the room, and every ten seconds the hands froze. I wrapped up and said we would figure it out later.
Doors to other dimensions
By evening there were twelve sample worlds on paper and a floor arrow pointing to the door, because with the frame rate down to 32 among the trees I could not find it. I also asked if any game like this existed. I remembered once opening doors to other dimensions in VR, and every world felt like art and a little weird. It was not on Quest 3. I could not find it again. Nothing I looked at was the game I was imagining.
So that night I wrote down what it should be: exploration through doors, like in Monsters, Inc., with a relaxed mode to wander as long as you want. The second mode, a timed one with pursuers, I would drop within the week. Before I slept the backend moved from a web framework to plain Bun, and I added: "do not keep the old name anywhere."