At midnight I told the first world to shrink. Twenty percent of the size. Find the distilled essence of each thing and stop trying to copy the paintings. The paintings had done their job: they had taught us what to build. The world itself was now its own thing. I asked for a translucent red wall at the edge, only so I could feel the scale when walking.
How much can a world hold?
Then I asked the question that every game maker asks at some point: how many things can this world hold before it stutters? I set up a test. Start at a random spot, add things until the frame rate falls to 30, then take away distant detail until it climbs back to 60, and repeat. I set one rule, a triangle per ten centimetres at most, and the far things get fewer and fewer. It was like tuning an old engine by ear.
The world grew and so did my list of complaints, all small and all true. The hills were abnormally tall. The brown path plates floated above the ground. There were so many walls and so few houses. The clouds should be whiter underneath, each at its own slow speed, and cast a shadow on the ground. The ground triangles were so big that walking felt like walking on glass.
The crash
And then the evening, which I still remember as a kind of weather. I had four to six sessions of Claude open. My desktop crashed, though the assistants kept running behind it. Then the whole machine rebooted without warning. I wrote to the assistants:
The system has been rebooted abruptly. Check the state and report if this session has concluded.
I sent it seven times, once to each window. I know it is funny. It did not feel funny at six in the evening.
When the dust settled, I made a rule I have kept: every branch merges to main and is deleted, and from now on we work from main. One road. It sounds small. It saved the project.
The viewer becomes the game
After that, the best of the day. The viewer I had been using to look at the worlds slowly became the game itself: a stats box, a key for beams of light over the door and the landmarks, a world picker with live previews, one command to play and another to run the server. And I thought about the bigger picture. A server hosted at home, a socket to each player, every API read only, a key for every tester. Cloudflare tunnels already waiting. I wrote it in a side plan and promised to come back to the main one.
It ended with a compass and a minimap, and a small note that appears when the server connection is lost. That note matters to me. A calm game should say so when something is wrong.