Building Agoro Camp in public

Everything below this entry was written about the first Agoro Camp: a camp builder that runs in the browser. It is still online, and it did its job, which was to show what the game is about. What it could not do was let you arrive at the camp the way I did in March 2022, down an olive track with a van and a caravan. So on 23 September I started the game again in Unreal Engine 5.8, and that is where it lives now.

The ground is the real ground. The terrain comes from Portugal’s national survey data for this exact hillside, so the track, the olive trees and the ruin sit where they really are, with about 3,000 trees placed from the same data. I got there by a detour: I first generated worlds of the camp with World Labs, and comparing them with the survey showed me where generated ground stops matching the real site.

The people and the vehicles are Tripo models. My own body, the founders Kai and Amara and the companion Kofa, rigged and animated. The van Holzmichel, the caravan and the stone pump house, made game-ready in Blender. And since version 3, Nilua: Paulin Hülsmann, the singer whose song “Where do we go” was written about this camp, as a 3D character made with her consent.

Two missions are playable. “Arrival” is the true story: tow the caravan down the track, cut a low olive branch out of the way with the pole pruner, spend the first night, build the power in the morning. “GO LIVE” is the camp’s first concert: set up the gazebo, the lights and the recording, then Nilua plays, and the game hands over to her real live take.

Three versions in two weeks. Version 2 (5 October) put Holzmichel and the caravan on the track and made GO LIVE playable. Version 3 (the same night) added Nilua. Version 3.3 (6 October) came out of my own playtest: you can now get into the van from either side, because in 3 you could get stuck on the wrong one. It also has real olive branches instead of grey spheres, Nilua’s song in the menu, and the birds I recorded at the camp in 2022 instead of synthetic wind.

It runs on Mac and on Windows. The Mac build needs Apple silicon. The Windows build of 3.3 was packaged today. It is not code-signed yet, so Windows asks before it runs it. I checked that it starts and loads the camp, but in a virtual machine without a graphics card, so I have not yet seen how fast it runs on a real PC.

It is entered in Tripothon S1, Tripo’s world-building hackathon, in the Game track with the Tripo, World Labs and Jupiter tool tracks. I submitted it on 5 October and kept it up to date through 7 October. On 17 October I show it at the Demo Day in Barcelona, and Paulin sings the same song live there. The Jupiter part is a plan, not a feature: the idea is the camp as a glasses-free 3D diorama on Jupiter’s display, and the device has not arrived yet.

It is still a prototype. Some vehicles and props are placeholders, and nothing is for sale. AI coding agents wrote much of the code with me; I am responsible for every line of it, and for every word here.

Today I set up the studio’s Steamworks account and paid Valve’s product fee for the first game: €84.99, including VAT. The fee is per game, so one payment opens the account and buys one place on the store. Agoro Camp and Agoro Road are both headed for Steam, which makes the second game a second fee. Both are planned for the Epic Games Store as well.

The paperwork is done and it is Valve’s turn. Its identity and tax check can take up to ten working days, and until it clears there is no store page to build and nothing to wishlist. After that come two waits nobody can shorten: at least 21 days between the fee and any release, and a public coming-soon page for at least two weeks before launch.

The part that holds this game back is not Valve. Steam asks for at least five screenshots of real gameplay, landscape, 1920 by 1080. Agoro Camp does not have them yet. That is the next piece of work, and it will be written here when it is done.

Kofa is the Sankofa bird. He was made here, for Agoro Camp, and he is named after the middle of the word — San-ko-fa, where ko-fa is “go and fetch”. That is his whole job.

His loop is retrieve, reveal, scout. You lose something and he brings it back. He perches and shows what stood on this ground before. And scouting ahead unlocks only on ground whose past you have already retrieved — the future is not visible until the past is known. That is the rule of the character, not a line of flavour text.

The gold egg in his beak is the read-out for it: empty means this place’s past is still lost. That works because the egg came out of the mesh as a genuinely separate object, so the game can light it rather than imply it.

What is new today. Kofa is no longer only this camp’s. He is the companion for Agoro Road as well — the same bird, the same look, different abilities in each game, so a player who meets him on the road recognises a friend when they arrive at the camp. A character the studio already owns costs nothing to design into a second game, which is the argument for building him properly once.

He also cost a week nobody planned for. The animation library I meant to take flight cycles from classes a two-legged bird as avian, and its avian section is empty — not thin, empty. Worse, when I went to pose him he shredded: the rig’s skeleton was in the wrong place, bones sitting most of a body-length away from the flesh they control. I kept the weights, moved every bone back inside its own body, and he stood up. The repair is written up in full on the Agoro Road log.

He has three hand-authored clips now — a walk, an idle and the look-back above. They live in the character file. He is not in the playable build of either game yet, and the date he arrives in each is not set.