“Annabella’s Song – 2000 Remaster” by Everclear
Yes, I am still building this game. Yes, I am also actively interviewing for the next thing. Gasp!
I’ve never had more fun in my life. No truly – every game I ever built before this was either a game I could only achieve because of truly limited resources and the teams I was fortunate enough to be on or funded by my own savings into a black hole, or an app that Apple ended up rebuilding the same features for into their native applications. Live long enough and you will have your own flavor of this story. 🙂
Wonderlum (still a placeholder name), is accidently and progressively becoming the dream pet game I never thought I’d be able to afford to build.
Many are experimenting to see how large of a game they can rebuild with the simplist of prompts thrown at GPT-6 Astra – that isn’t this. The current workflow for each feature is always (1) a new session with Claude Code mainly Opus (2) references a design doc with details (3) involves collaborating with Gemini on individual assets and Claude Design. As features get more baked in a design doc, I drop them in and start. Smaller features and improvements also get new Claude sessions.
Every feature is a love letter and crafted in partnership with AI but also more with it as an assistant. I care so much about AI not making “generic” choices and using it more as a coder than a game designer. But my new favorite part is the 20K simulations it will run as I try to balance items across days of time and play states.
You can now adopt and manage pets in the Menagerie. This lets you also uncover up to 15 different species, each with their own abilities in the game across a wide variety of use cases – from vendor negotation, to extra armor for the party, to preventing bandits from stealing your stuff. While I am still building out the abilities, several of them are working today!
You can imagine everything that had to be built for this – including testing “SuperLongNamePuffyBear” conditions, what happens when a pet hits 0 health, and how stats change when you discover more species looks (Hint: Finding species looks gives you more health, not only a cosmetic).
There are additionally new stats for pets:
- Health: Can’t go to battle if you don’t have anything to lose.
- Wellbeing: Pets have to be fed or they lose wellbeing every day.
- Battle Stats: Armor, Acumen, Attack, Compassion. More later in a future blog post on Battle Expeditions, a feature I’m not ready to talk about yet.
With those stats comes abilities – like being able to feed pets items that you’ve bought. This means I needed to implement two stores! We have the Owlmory (pun intended) and The Tavern, where pet foodie dreams are made.
Because items now are working in the game with stats, I also had to complete an entire balance pass across all items. Yikes. Balancing items only makes sense if enough systems are implemented for an economy to properly function – which means I also began on Pet Leveling and Player Leveling in tandem. What does a level in a pet unlock? How do pet levels impact player levels? What do I gate in the world? I didn’t want Claude to answer these questions – I wanted to.
There are more details to come on how these features work, but I’m pretty happy with the progress so far on the systems designs implemented.
The art still maintains a point of frustration for me despite Gemini being a good model. It’s great for placeholder art and terribly inconsistent in some views – mainly when the game turns to nighttime, which is not only a visually aesthetic transition, but a systems design choice as well that impacts multiple features in the game.
As more buildings get added to the world to build out features and mechanics, the art inconsistency problem continues to perpetuate and scale. I’m sure I’ll fold at some point in the future but for now I am still trying to build as much as I can without external dependencies.
It is also becoming increasingly obvious that I need sound and music – something I would hate to generate with AI especially given the world screams something between Wingspan and Mumford and Sons. If a banjo doesn’t make it into this, my friends will question everything. I could totally see releasing a soundtrack along side this like Stardew Valley and Wingspan both did. Why not? Dream big.
In any case, I’ve been having a ton of fun. Will it ever launch? Will it ever get a real name? Will I ever get to partner with an artist and also a musician? No idea.
The problem with games is eventually you have to figure out if people would really play them and that also takes money and time largely funded by disappointment. For now, I am content with building the thing I’ve wanted to built for a long time in my spare time even if it ends up being only for fun.
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See also “Meet Wonderlum: Built in React & Rust-Based Tauri”
