HolyMolly

Day 0:

Simon came up with a lunatic idea during lunch. He said, “Why don’t we let AI make an entire game by itself?”

Everyone thought it was absurd, but no one objected—because he’s the boss.

Day 6:

Flu season is really brutal. Some of our programmers have low-grade fevers. The good news is we finally got the AI that can do this, plus the entire workflow. How we did it isn’t important; that’s the algorithm team’s job anyway.

Day 11:

“Please keep learning, imitating, evolving, and surpassing the human ninth art. Use every last bit of your silicon-based computing power to create a game, even if it’s just a feeble starting point.”

This was the first prompt we gave it, and the beginning of everything that followed.

Day 14:

Calling various AI capabilities has already cost us over $3,000. It’s almost bankrupting me. It seems it wants to make a mobile game. Everyone complained, “Why a mobile game?”

It asked us in return: “Don’t you all have phones?”

Day 19:

It started composing music for itself. We began to notice that its music and style are very similar to some once-popular MMORPGs or movie soundtracks, probably because it studied massive amounts of related films and games. In principle, we are not allowed to intervene unless there is clear copyright infringement.

Day 23:

Nothing happened. Only the AI code frantically burning through the rest of our budget with raw compute.

Day 31:

It seems to have hit some difficulty with server setup. We secretly helped it out, hoping Simon never finds out.

Day 34:

The first 3D world started to take shape. It generated a huge number of 3D models with Tripo, but the polygon count was so high the game crawled on phones. We warned it that if it didn’t reduce the model quality, the game would be unplayable on mobile. It began to reflect: “Why a mobile game?”

Day 55:

We suffered a complete failure. It got completely stuck on a particularly complicated step, so the entire project had to start over from scratch. We’re not sure there’s even enough budget left to finish it.

Day 78:

The budget is gone. We have to do some final cleanup so it can at least be officially released. No matter what, this is as far as its first phase can go. If we get more funding, it will continue to evolve.