Until now the worlds were text. On the third day I put real pictures in them. I had generated a set of paintings that showed what each world should feel like, and I asked the assistant to look at each one and file it in the right world as its cover. Then I asked for a settings file for each world, and for a list of things that exist in each picture. "Every detail you see." Could we find models that look like these?
The first world that felt like a place
We searched wide: animated ones, openly licensed ones, even ones that need a credit. For the green hills, then for a neon market in the rain, which was the first world that felt like a place instead of a demo. I also asked for one contact sheet per world, so that I could see all the models at once and decide with my eyes.
A name for the game
In the evening I built a website for the project and then spent an hour on the name, which every project has to do once. I said we needed a better name. Neverwas was perfect, until I asked it to search for conflicts. Everafter. Then just "Doors". Then JumpDoors. I picked JumpDoors that night and told the assistant to rename everything, knowing I would not keep it.
Honest feedback
The hard part of the day was honesty. I put on the headset and my feedback was not polite. I wrote:
What the actual fuck are those hands! Like sticks with joints. Ugly and funny.
They did not even bend. When I opened a door the game stuttered, as if it tried to load the whole next world in one breath, and I said the crossing should be smooth and awesome, not a mess. The edge of each world was a tall wall that broke the whole illusion from a distance, so I asked for something like a sea. I also said the light and shadows looked childish.
That is the part nobody tells you about making a world alone with a machine: the machine says it is done, and then you stand inside and it is not. I wrote it all down as a list and asked for fixes, one by one.
One more decision that evening: no space police. I removed a whole layer from the plan, because the game I wanted was calm.