Many hands

On November 2 the work moved from a cloud chat to Claude Code running on my own PC, with an RTX 3080 Ti to test on. I asked whether every task could work that way from then on, with one main chat to divide up the work. That became the routine for the rest of the week.

One coordinating session splits the work into separate sessions. Each runs in its own git worktree and owns its own files. The coordinator reviews each branch, merges it into the main line once the tests pass, and writes up the development log. Illustrated art follows the same chain of command: Claude lays out a scene in Blender, and ChatGPT paints one sticker per slot to that layout.

The first wave landed together. Battle sprites started taking the room's light: each atlas gets a generated normal map, a bevel off the silhouette plus a little relief, snapped to a few flat planes the way a pixel artist would shade them. A fighter by a campfire is now warm on one side and dark on the other, for well under 0.05 ms a frame. The cart overlay was polished at four screen sizes, and Thistle the Unlit, a ranged hexcaster, got the rest of their animations.

Parallel work also produced a new kind of bug. Every worktree's test suite served the game on the same port, so one checkout's tests could quietly run against another checkout's code and pass for the wrong reasons. The test runner now picks a free port of its own, and a new browser-free test plans 150 floors in every combination to check the contract the party and the battle view rely on.

By that evening the routine was holding up. Ten branches merged in one sitting: rooms at their own heights joined by stairs, a boss lair worth the walk, searching and treasure, and fossils, ore and bones set into the walls.