Building Agoro Road in public

The browser game at road.agoro.games is still the first prototype, and it is still free to play. On 5 October it got a switch between the painted 2D view and the 3D view, and four new worlds, painted for the 2D board, joined the journey. Eight worlds now run from First Light to The Crossroads, at four difficulty levels.

What the browser game taught me went into a second build in Unreal Engine 5.8, made from the same Tripo models. On 4 October it ran on a mobile device for the first time: I played the whole Hearthland journey on a Galaxy Tab S7+, start to end, without a crash. In the days after, it got touch controls, a flick that turns a stamp to face where you point, the four difficulty levels, the four new worlds, a two-finger twist that turns the camera, and settings for graphics and resolution. The goat, which had been sliding along the road in its rest pose, walks now.

This build is not public and not finished, and some of it is plainly wrong. On the tablet no graphics setting holds 30 frames a second during a wave yet. The travellers stand by the caravan, but they do not walk the roads and they do not guide the animals off the road yet; that is the next piece of work. The keeper, the woman who guides the animals home, has existed since 6 October as a rigged Tripo model with a walk and guiding gestures, but she is not in the game yet. Both are planned for the mobile app stores as two versions of Agoro Road: the app version of the browser game, and the Unreal version as a separate Special Edition.

On 6 October I entered both into Tripothon S1, Tripo's world-building hackathon. Agoro Road went into the Game track, with a walkthrough filmed on the tablet and in the browser. A second entry, The World You Can Hold, went into the Physical Design track: the same Tripo models, printed as figurines on the studio's own printer. The Demo Day is in Barcelona on 17 October.

Since 7 October the download for the jury holds the Android build and a Windows build. The Windows build was packaged on 6 October and has not been played on a Windows PC yet; the Android build is the one I tested.

The Agoro Road walkthrough · The World You Can Hold

An AI agent drafted this entry from the project record. I am responsible for every word.

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 Road and Agoro Camp are both headed for Steam, which makes the second game a second fee. Both are planned for the Epic Games Store as well.

I wanted to switch my store to Estonia first, because that is where the company is registered. Steam does not work that way. The store country is where the person paying lives, which for me is Portugal, and the company's own country goes into the paperwork that follows. So the fee went through the Portuguese store, and the studio signed up as the Estonian company it is.

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 Road does not have them yet. That is the next piece of work, and it will be written here when it is done.

On 19 September the road held sixty frames a second in 3D, but eleven of the things standing on it were stand-ins: the tree, the wall, the sacks, the waymarker, the shrub, the small lantern, the caravan and the four stamps. This week an agent made all eleven again, this time from the concept art, one approved reference picture per object before any model was built.

I looked at the four stamps before the other seven were made, and not all of them passed. The agent's own review found that the garden stamp grew two solid shapes the concept never had and too few herbs, and that the drum's lacing breaks in the version made for a game engine. I chose a working demo over a finished one: they went in as they are, and the garden stamp stays on the list to be made again.

On 23 September the 3D view was merged into the game itself. Every test passes, and the same sixty-frames check still holds with forty travellers on the road. The pictures below are the real game, the same saved journey at Lantern Bend, before and after the new objects — taken before the evening look went in, so the camera there still points straight down.

Later that night the look went in as well: dusk while you build, night while you defend, dawn when the road holds, with a tilted camera, hills and a treeline. I played it on my own machine and decided that this is the version that goes public. It still has faults I can see: the ground and its borders repeat, the tree crowns are coarse, and the dawn light is simpler than the concept. A design review this week also said plainly that the four stamps still differ only in their numbers. What the first release of the road includes is my decision to make, and it will be written here when it is made.

Photographs from the studio table, 15 to 20 September. Everyone was printed in the one colour on the spool, magenta: the walker, Amara twice, an orc who is not on the road yet, Daniel with his staff — and a stepped tower that is not a character at all, but the piece that tells the printer how hot to run.

Two of the figures in the row still wear their supports; the strands under the two Amaras are what holds a printed dress up while it is made. The orc kept his pillar and a web of fine threads. He is in the picture because that is what the process looks like on a bad afternoon, and this page keeps the bad afternoons.

From behind, the purple figure shows what the supports leave when they come off: a rough hem, marks down the calves. Sanding helps a little. A different material may help more, so two further filaments are on the list to test. Until they pass, magenta is the only colour I can promise anyone.

The travellers also stood somewhere else this week: inside a Fortnite test island, on a tablet. Forty-one of the studio's objects went into an island in Epic's editor and the private version was played on a Galaxy Tab. The carrier with his pack and the walker in his dark coat stand beside a Fortnite avatar — the avatar is Epic's, because the studio's own cannot be played there; the licence allows these travellers only as characters you meet. A test of the pipeline, not a place the studio is moving to.

And on the studio's own Mac, Unreal Engine 5.8 now runs, and a first-person walker moves through the reconstructed camp on the ground the world reconstruction gives it. That is the ground-level camp this log keeps mentioning as the road's sibling. Nothing of it is a game yet; it is a person standing in a photograph you can walk into.

Unreal Editor for Fortnite is Windows-only. The documentation is blunt about it: to use UEFN, you will need a PC. I do not have one here. So Windows went into a virtual machine on the laptop, and the editor opened, and Verse compiled, and the travellers, the cart, a tree and a watch-post stood in a Fortnite island that I then played on a tablet.

That part worked. The three things I learned next are the useful part, and none of them is about hardware.

You cannot be your own character. The player in Fortnite is a Fortnite avatar. The realistic-human system is allowed in the editor, but the licence permits it only for characters you meet, never the one you play. A game whose whole subject is the traveller you are cannot put its traveller in the player's hands there.

The game will not run where the editor runs. Fortnite needs a security feature the virtual machine cannot provide, so the editing happens on the Mac and the playtesting happens on a tablet, by code. That loop works, and it is slower than it sounds.

And the photographed world could not come in. I had rebuilt the rest camp from eight generated views — as a cloud of points it is genuinely good, the best look at this place there is. Converted to the kind of surface a game engine wants, it is confetti: over a million fragments that do not simplify. Cutting it by more than ninety-nine per cent removed a third of them. It is a picture you can stand inside, not geometry you can build on.

Yesterday's two prints (below) failed on one quantity: material left on the figure. The slicing checks had passed both files, because none of them measured that. So the first thing built this morning was the missing instrument: a script that reads the finished toolpath and reports how many square millimetres of support tips touch the model, in how many spots, and whether any support trunk grows out of the figure itself.

Then the setting everyone reaches for. "Supports on the build plate only" sounds like the fix for residue. On Daniel's file it changed 191 mm² in 1,083 spots to 184 mm² in 1,040 — because every one of the seven trunks was already standing on the plate. The residue was never the trunks. It was the tips under the bag, the hands and the chin, and the branches brushing the walls on the way up.

What did move it: thinner trees with a single wall, a wider gap to the walls, a taller gap under the model and a steeper threshold. Daniel 191 → 127 mm² (with the soles cut flat so nothing sits under the feet). Amara 178 → 45 mm², with no struts, no posts and no block — the two curls that still started in mid-air got a hidden 1 mm bridge into the hair mass, two millimetres long, that never has to be removed. Twelve small tilts of each figure were sliced and measured; every one was worse than standing upright. Layer height turned out to be a lever too: at 0.14 mm instead of 0.2 mm the tips on Amara fall to 8.5 mm², for 27 more minutes of printing — sliced and measured, not yet printed.