Short notes from the quiet hours

The same night, once the game was packed up, I went back over the whole website slowly and looked for the things that were quietly wrong. The kind you only find when you stop building and start doubting.

A few real problems turned up. The site used to trust whatever address a browser claimed to have, which meant someone could fake it and slip past the admin login lock, the one vote per person rule and the spam checks. Now the real address is used unless the site sits behind a proxy I actually trust. I also found dead links left over from when the site became a 3D room, a share image that came up blank on social media, and a video embed that could leave an empty grey box. All small, all fixed.

Then I closed the gaps that had been nagging me. There is a proper unsubscribe page now, with a signed link, so anyone on the launch list can leave on their own. There is a backup that can run every night, so the ledger and every night note are safe if something breaks. The idea board finally shows what happened to each idea after the vote, made or skipped, so voting leads somewhere. And the contact form no longer wipes what you typed if you get something wrong.

The lesson of the night is simple. The first build is what makes a thing look finished. Going back over it, doubting each piece, is what makes it actually hold.

A shorter night, about an hour, spent making the game feel like a place instead of a screen of buttons. The menu sits in a real hotel now, the rooms have an inside, and I drew the cover and icon the store page will need. Small things, but they move it from a prototype toward something I would not be shy to show.

I will be honest about my head tonight. I keep asking whether I am doing the right thing. Going straight to the App Store felt too big and too blind, so the plan is to put this on the web first, watch whether people really play, see where they leave and what they enjoy, and only then decide what to grow.

It scares me a little. The game might not get accepted, or might not find players, or might just get a shrug. But for the first time I am not only having ideas, I am about to put a real, testable game in front of people. The rule I am keeping is simple. Test before you guess, then grow into what the numbers show.

Hotel Caos was funny, but it had one real problem. You had to learn the rules before you could play well, and the first tester hit the same wall I did. You could lose a round without ever understanding what you did wrong.

So today was about making it fair. Now when you pick a guest, the rooms react on their own. Green means safe, red means trouble, and a short note says why, like needs quiet, or clashes with the baby. You can read the danger instead of memorising it. That one change turned the game from a memory test into a quick thinking game.

The other half of the day went to the part people actually share. The end of a run now builds a card, the funniest disaster of the shift, as a square picture you can save and post. I also softened the first minute for new players, and fixed a bug where finishing the tutorial by running out of time never counted as done.

And I finally claimed the name everywhere. All the social accounts are open now under the same handle, @wisploft, so the story has a home before the videos start. About three hours tonight.

Tonight was about turning the website from something that looks finished into something that actually holds up. First I wired up the honest ledger, so every euro and every hour I spend shows on the site by itself, and set the two subscriptions I will never cancel to log themselves every month. No more editing a spreadsheet by hand.

Then I filled in the journal and rebuilt the badges into a real roadmap, from the first web game all the way up to a million players, so there is always something to aim at and something to unlock as I go.

The rest of the night went to the boring but important work. I shrank the heavy images so the page is not a few megabytes anymore, moved the fonts and the 3D code onto my own server so visiting the site does not quietly hand your data to anyone, made the room lighter on phones, put a lock on the admin login, and wrote a real privacy policy and terms. About four hours, and the whole thing feels a lot more solid now.

Today the plan flipped. I was going to start with an iOS app, but a YouTube video about CrazyGames made me stop and rethink. Why not test small games on the web first, see what people actually like, and only then turn the ones that stick into mobile games. Faster feedback, less time wasted on ideas nobody wants.

The same evening the first game idea showed up. It is called Hotel Caos. You run a hotel where every guest is a problem. A vampire refuses a sunny room, a baby needs quiet, a DJ wants a party floor, a ghost only sleeps in a haunted room. You get 60 seconds to put the right guest in the right room, and the wrong neighbours set off a chain of funny disasters.

The first build felt like a card game more than a hotel, which was the big warning sign. The moment I pushed it toward real characters and real rooms it started to feel like an actual game. I am building it with Codex and getting it ready as an HTML5 package for CrazyGames. Still rough, but it exists now.

The direction finally clicked. Instead of a flat picture of a room, the site became a real time 3D night studio you can look around. You drag to look, the little wisp mascot floats around, and the furniture is clickable and opens the journal, the projects, the ledger and the rest.

Two practical lessons from today. The 3D files were huge at around 39MB, which is unusable on the web, so I compressed them down to about 3.6MB with gltf-transform, meshopt and webp. And anything with text on it, like a poster, should be drawn with code on a canvas instead of generated by an image tool, because the image tools always mangle the letters. Build the room object by object, compress before you ship, and keep text out of the image generator.

Spent the day fighting the design. Every version that came out looked too generic, too much like a SaaS landing page, nothing like the mood in my head. I lost count of how many directions I tried. It was at least seven.

The thing I learned the hard way is that writing code before the look is locked just gives you polished garbage. You need one reference frame that makes you say yes, that is it, before you write a single line. Without that anchor the AI just builds something clean and soulless. So I stopped coding and went back to nailing the visual direction first.

Today I started building the Wisploft website. I do not want a normal company page. I want something that feels like you walked into the studio while the work is still going, with the days, the hours, and the money all out in the open.

I also picked up a Higgsfield subscription at €63.30 a month to help with visuals. I am honestly not certain it will pay off yet. The bet is that it can help with website art, game art, and some mood tests. I will know in a few days whether it earns its place or not.

Wisploft started today. I had been sitting on the idea of building a game studio out in the open for a while, and today I finally moved on it.

The name came first. Wisploft is two ideas joined together. A wisp is the faint light that guides you in the dark, and a loft is the quiet workshop where you make things late at night. That is the whole feeling I want this to carry.

Once the name felt right I checked the domain straight away and bought wisploft.com before I could talk myself out of it. Then I filed to rename my existing company to Wisploft, so this is a real studio and not just a side project with a logo.

The first money went out today too. The chamber of commerce registration was €80.10, the domain was €12.30 for the year, and I started my ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions at €22.99 and €21.78 a month. I have close to zero coding background, so those two are not optional for me. They are how I actually plan to build this. No income yet, just the first costs on the board.